Page 28

e gathering around the car to peer inside and run awed fingers over the blue body. Ugwu shooed them away. He wished Anulika were home, so she would go with him into their mother’s hut. He wished Nnesinachi would drop by now and take his hand in hers and tell him soothingly that his mother’s illness was not serious at all, and then lead him to the grove by the stream and untie her wrapper and offer him her breasts, lifting them up and forward toward him. The children were chattering loudly. Some women stood by and spoke in lower tones, their arms folded. His father kept asking Master to have some kola nut, palm wine, a stool to sit down, some water, and Master kept saying no, no, no. Ugwu wanted his father to shut up. He moved closer to the hut and looked in. His eyes met his mother’s in the dim light. She looked shriveled.

“Ugwu,” she said. “Nno, welcome.”

“Deje,” he greeted, and then remained silent, watching, while his aunty helped her tie her wrapper around her waist and led her out.

Ugwu was about to help his mother into the car when Master said, “Step aside, my good man.” Master helped her into the car, asked her to lie down on the backseat, to stretch out as much as she could.

Ugwu suddenly wished that Master would not touch his mother because her clothes smelled of age and must, and because Master did not know that her back ached and her cocoyam patch always yielded a poor harvest and her chest was indeed on fire when she coughed. What did Master know about anything anyway, since all he did was shout with his friends and drink brandy at night?

“Stay well, we will send you word after a doctor has looked at her,” Master said to Ugwu’s father and aunty before they drove off.

Ugwu kept himself from glancing back at his mother; he rolled his window down so the air would rush loudly past his ears and distract him. When he finally turned to look at her, just before they got to the campus, his heart stopped at the sight of her shut eyes, her lax lips. But her chest was rising and falling. She was breathing. He exhaled slowly and thought about those cold evenings when she would cough and cough, and he would stand pressed to the flinty walls of her hut, listening to his father and Chioke ask her to drink the mixture.

Olanna opened the door, wearing the apron that had an oil stain in front. His apron. She kissed Master. “I’ve asked Patel to come,” she said, and then turned to Ugwu’s mother. “Mama. Kedu?”

“I am well,” his mother whispered. She glanced around the room and seemed to shrink even more at the sight of the sofas, the radiogram, the curtains.

“I’ll take her inside,” Olanna said. “Ugwu, please finish in the kitchen and set the table.”

“Yes, mah.”

In the kitchen, Ugwu stirred the pot of pepper soup. The oily broth swirled, the hot spices wafted up and tickled his nose, and the pieces of meat and tripe floated from side to side. But he did not really notice. He was straining to hear something. It was long, too long, since Olanna had taken his mother in and Dr. Patel went in to join them. The peppers made his eyes water. He remembered that last time when she was sick from the coughing, how she cried out that she could no longer feel her legs and the dibia asked her to tell the evil spirits to leave her alone. “Tell them it is not yet your time! Gwa ha kita! Tell them now!” the dibia had urged her.

“Ugwu!” Master called. The guests had arrived. Ugwu went into the living room and his hands worked mechanically, serving kola nuts and alligator pepper, uncorking bottles, shoveling ice, laying out steaming bowls of pepper soup. Afterward, he sat down in the kitchen and pulled at his toenails and imagined what was going on in the bedroom. He could hear Master’s raised voice from the living room. “Nobody is saying that burning government property is a good thing, but to send the army in to kill in the name of order? There are Tiv people lying dead for nothing. For nothing! Balewa has lost his mind!”

Ugwu did not know who the Tiv people were, but hearing the word dead made him shiver. “It is not yet your time,” he whispered. “Not yet your time.”

“Ugwu?” Olanna was at the kitchen door.

He flew off the stool. “Mah? Mah?”

“You mustn’t worry about her. Dr. Patel says it’s an infection and she will be fine.”

“Oh!” Ugwu was so relieved he feared he would float away if he raised one leg. “Thank, mah!”

“Put the rest of the pottage in the fridge.”

“Yes, mah.” Ugwu watched her go back to the living room. The embroidery on her close-fitting dress gleamed and she looked, for a moment, like a shapely spirit who had emerged from the sea.

The guests were laughing now. Ugwu peeked into the living room. Many of them were no longer sitting upright but sloped on their seats, mellowed by alcohol, languorous with ideas. The evening was ending. The conversation would soften into tennis and music; then they would get up and giggle loudly at things that were not funny, such as the front door being difficult to open and the night bats flying too low. He waited for Olanna to go to the bathroom and Master to his study before he went in to see his mother, asleep, curled childlike on the bed.

She was bright-eyed the next morning. “I am well,” she said. “The medicine that doctor gave me is very powerful. But what will kill me is that smell.”

“What smell?”

“In their mouth. I smelled it when your madam and master came in to see me this morning and also when I went to ease myself.”

“Oh. That is toothpaste. We use it to clean our teeth.” Ugwu felt proud saying we, so that his mother would know that he too used it.

But she did not look impressed. She snapped her fingers and picked up her chewing stick. “What is wrong with using a good atu? That smell has made me want to vomit. If I stay here much longer I will not be able to keep food in my stomach because of that smell.”

She looked impressed, though, when Ugwu told her that he would be living in the Boys’ Quarters. It was like being given his own house, separate, all to himself. She asked him to show her the Boys’ Quarters, marveled that it was bigger than her hut, and, later, insisted that she was well enough to help in the kitchen. He watched her, bent over to sweep the floor, and remembered how she used to smack Anulika’s bottom for not bending properly to sweep. “Did you eat mushrooms? Sweep like a woman!” she would say, and Anulika would grumble that the broom was too short and it was not her fault that people were too stingy to buy longer brooms. Ugwu suddenly wished that Anulika were here, as well as the little children and the gossiping wives of his umunna. He wished his whole village were here, so he could join in the moonlight conversations and quarrels and yet live in Master’s house with its running taps and refrigerator and stove.

“I will go home tomorrow,” his mother said.

“You should stay a few more days and rest.”

“I will go tomorrow. I shall thank your master and mistress when they return and tell them I am well enough to go home. May another person do for them what they have done for me.”