By: Frances Ogamba
A lifetime ago, spirits of unrested dead men raided Omambara, greyed all vegetation and randomly slaughtered people. They also came with a strangely synthesized cry, which hit a flaring, inconceivable crescendo. To repel them, the town consulted Afa, their link to God. Afa answered and raised a keeper for Omambara; one gifted with sights that transcended the ordinary, who saw that a veil between the town and the afterlife had torn, thereby letting in dead men who lived a short life and were deeply dissatisfied with their fate. They must stitch the rift in eight Igbo market days or risk their town’s annihilation. They invented a tradition known as the Ritual of Tears, where they took the tears of men, and sutured the tear with them. A magical rock was erected on the seam joining the two existences: the town, and the afterlife. The male children of Omambara were taken to this rock on the twelfth day of their birth, where the keeper extracted their tears and sealed them in the rock. The ritual was preserved in the event of a repeat incident. Like now.
Three nights after the cry of the dead roused Omambara Town from sleep, the dead attacked Alonna, the keeper. They ripped off the door of Alonna’s home and tore him into parts while he slept. His first wife, Oge, awoke to the ruckus and found the battered body, the dismembered parts holding onto the torso by mere strands of flesh. Alonna who descended from the loins of Obiozo, the son of Azunna, and Mbele, and Okwara, and Nwakibie, and Anagbaoso, the town’s very first keeper. Alonna, whose magic was rumoured to give him rides on draughts of air, and when a bright glow streaked the night sky, people often said that it was his soul returning from a trip. Everything felt wrong with Alonna’s death. Omambara went to Afa in panic, and it led them to a new keeper, Juochi, Alonna’s nine-year old son.
###
There was a gilded edge to the morning sun as Juochi knelt in the town’s arena, an open arid space. Three trainers of keepers, Adanne, Okezie and Maduako, towered above him. The day was just starting up. The loose sand of the arena breathed dust as the circle around him grew with more townspeople tumbling out of the houses to witness Juochi’s initiation into the order of keepers. Fear strummed the air. Eight people had been killed since the first night of the cry. Juochi’s own fear rattled deep down in his sternum. What if whatever killed his father took him too? What kind of annihilation would befall Omambara?
The voice of the lead trainer, Adanne, was weathered and almost caving in the middle.
“Do you pledge to guard the rock with your life, and to challenge the dead with the strength of your fathers?” What challenge? Juochi wondered. Was the task not to simply patch the torn veil? He’d thought of it as passing a needle and a thread between two ends and pulling them as tightly close as possible.
“Do you agree to stand in the gap for Omambara Town in these times?”
Adanne’s gaze pinioned Juochi. He’d always feared the lead trainer, the lines of her face never creasing into a smile, her thick body which could shove down anyone and anything. The initiation was the closest he’d ever been to her.
“I do,” Juochi heard himself say.
Juochi was Alonna’s other child, born to Alonna’s second wife, Ijele. Juochi’s relationship with Alonna was a faint smudge because in Omambara, keepers who had two families were only allowed to live with one, to forestall domestic distractions. Alonna’s first family had adult daughters and sons who were not interested in the task of keeping. All of them, lured by distant civilizations, had left Omambara. After they left, Alonna remained with his first wife, Oge, while Juochi and his mother continued to live in a different house. Through the years, Juochi had a vague awareness of the importance of his gifts, and of the man who fathered him. A few times, when he and his best friends, Mazi and Akuche, stumbled upon the procession of the keeper and the trainers, Alonna caressed Juochi’s head as if acknowledging his existence, and gave the boy an intimate look that gave Juochi gooseflesh. What he felt for his father was an awe that translated to fear. A man who could cut a rock open with his mind could lacerate a human body if he willed it.
Juochi wondered what his friends and other children thought of him now. He imagined them giggling, making light the precipice on which the moment teetered.
Resignation tinged the mood of the townspeople. Juochi heard the unasked questions. What a time for their famed keeper to die! What a time to appoint a child in his place! What about Alonna’s older children? Does this mean that Omambara has run out of keepers? What if the shrieks of the dead buoyed the town to erasure? Would Juochi be able to suture the gap between worlds?
Juochi wished they’d release him back into the hut he shared with his mother. Or to Mazi and Akuche’s company so that they’d resume trapping lizards in the ground. But he also knew that his childhood vanished the moment his father drew his final breath. Overnight, he felt his chest abs sharpening and extra layers of skin wrapping around his body to suit his destiny.
Adanne dipped palm fronds in a bowl of dark liquid and sprinkled it on Juochi. The effect stung because the liquid was cold. Juochi tried not to shiver. He pulled his eyes away from the vortex of faces and fixed them on the sand. He sliced and nicked the earth into rooms with his focused stare. It was how he knew of his kinship with grit and stones. In the past, other children would ask him to choose a stone and glide on a memory trail, and then say what he saw. As Adanne incanted, Juochi disappeared into the shiny pebbles and dangled on the void until the voices of the townspeople pooled around the darkness of his mind, glistening like stray stars.
Onye nche uzo, onye na-ahu ndi mmuo
Chebe anyi n’abali nile, nyana n’ututu nile
Ka mmuo rapu iranye anyi n’onwu
The keeper, the one who sees spirits.
Guard us all night and all morning
So that the dead do not taint us with death.
Voices swathed the air. Juochi almost singled out who owned each wave. He heard Obeledu, his father’s close friend. His hoarse voice blended with the shrill tone of Maduako, one of the trainers. He heard Ibenne, Golibe, Rapuba, Ogoma, Chikeluba. Some young men did the iya celebratory dances. They shot into the air as if their muscular bodies were mere hulks. They thudded to the ground, one foot first, then the second.
Ahoi! The town roared.
Ahoi! Ahoi! Ahoi! They chanted Juochi’s welcome to the path of his fathers.
The trainers accompanied Juochi home and waited at the door for Ijele to come out and receive her son.
“Dalunu. Dalunu,” Ijele said over and over. Her voice was well modulated as she thanked them, her recent loss folding into the rise and fall of each syllable.
“Our keeper,” Ijele said as soon as the trainers left. She looked at Juochi for a long time, possibly vacillating between beholding him as her only child and as Omambara’s keeper. Juochi felt discomfited by her eyes.
“You must learn what they teach you, Juochi. You can do it. You know rocks just like you know the branches of trees you climb. You must pay attention to Adanne.”
“What will happen if I fail?” There, in his mother’s hut, he was free to express fear.
“But you will not fail!”
“Didn’t papa fail?”
“He knew all the tricks. He probably underrated this attack.”
“Didn’t the dead take him?”
“You must rest,” Ijele said. She looked shriveled, and Juochi wondered when the physical transformation took place. Her mouth was sewed thin as if her desire for speech had been flagged by the present situation. She’d lost her husband, and now, her only son’s life was on the line. In fact, the life of the entire town was on the line.
“Mama, didn’t the spirits take him?”
Ijele looked up as if surprised that Juochi was still in the room.
“Juochi,” she whispered, then drew closer, “Your father was one of the best keepers Omambara ever installed. He fought them hard, and maybe he somehow slipped.” Ijele paused and clamped a hand on her mouth, letting the grief pass through her.
“Won’t I slip too?”
“Afa said you are the keeper. It means you can defeat them.” Juochi could feel her swaying towards him with the desire to fold his body into hers, as they once did. But he was the keeper now and nearly everyone didn’t know how to be around him.
###
On the night of Juochi’s crowning as the keeper, a cry ripped the air, brief and sporadic at first, then it lengthened with a heart-gouging sharpness that woke children and planted panicked whispers in throats. The frosty night made light of the darkness and painted a glossy shine on roofs. In the four days since it began, the usual response of the townspeople was to light oil lamps and place them at the main doors and windows of houses. Perhaps this sound thriving in the vacuous dark might be shattered by light and heat.
In the first hour, the sound remained fluttery like the lamp flames kissed by the wind. Slowly, it receded as if clambering back into a hole. Either the lamps or the leftovers of Alonna’s rituals before he died were at work. Juochi would begin work fully in the morning. Shoulders slumped in hope as the cry died down. Children were led back to bed. The mouths of babes once tightened around nipples in anxiety slackened with sleep.
The cry sneaked up on them again in the early hours of dawn. Some of the lamps burned low, the wicks now holding the last of the oil in the small tanks. The cry’s resurrection was a croon that crawled closer every passing minute. In another part of the town, where a covey of houses flexed mud and concrete walls against the adjoining forest, Enyinnaya, a thirtyish man, who was one of the town’s security guards, dashed out of his hut with ogbodu, a torch moulded from the pulp of the palm fruit.
He headed for the iron poles marking the boundary between their town and the next. The sky was porcelain grey. There were no stars. The moon appeared to have chosen to hold its watch in a different town. Enyinnaya had heard the cry the first time. But the second batch awakened his feet with ambition. In his right hand, he held ten sticks of ogbodu secured with a rope. In his left was the flaming torch of the ogbodu showing him where the paths arched upwards to meet his feet and where they slithered into a corner as if returning somewhere. If he succeeded in lighting the ogbodu and sticking them through the openings of the iron poles, if he made it to four other poles in different villages of the town, by dawn, he’d no longer be an ordinary member of the vigilante group. He’d become Enyinnaya, the saviour who filled Omambara town with light when the cry was bent on shredding her. Excitement scalded his lungs when the first pole came into sight. A thick iron sticking out of the earth, standing out in the foliage and trees wrapping around it. Enyinnaya extracted one ogbodu from the bundle and transferred light to it from the one burning in his left hand. As the light ate into the caked pulp, a white form taunted the corners of his vision. The cry sounded too close! It whirred right behind him! He spun on his feet and stabbed the ogbodu in the air around him.
“Onye? Who are you?”
The thrill of silence answered Enyinnaya. His heart rammed in his ribs as he ran, comforted by the thought that they wouldn’t come close if he had the fire. A gust of air knocked the first ogbodu out of his grip and snuffed out the fire. He dropped the second ogbodu in shock. He saw a wall of people who weren’t quite people, white and formless as gusts of smoke, dark coins of skin in the place of eyes.
###
Enyinnaya’s death woke the town. Some early risers found him thoroughly defleshed. Juochi had heard the cry, listened through every batch. But he had no powers yet until the trainers taught him what to do. The trepidation he felt for his new role was scraped away inch by inch by the cry. The town’s curse infuriated him, and he wanted to end it, for the town’s sake, for his father who perished on duty. That day, Okezie fetched him early. When he mentioned Enyinnaya’s death, Juochi saw the image of the young man doing the iya dance for his initiation the day before, jumping with grace, twirling midair before landing. Juochi could not imagine him as a corpse, especially one excarnated by the devourers. Other deaths occurred in parts of the town. The people who were murdered didn’t leave their houses like Enyinnaya did. The criers must have found them like they found Alonna, Juochi’s late father.
Juochi’s heart wobbled as they approached the entrance door of the keeper’s workspace. It was a two-room house. A high wall zipped the house tightly. Trees posed around it, as if on guard. Some versions of the legend said the house sprung out of the stone by itself. The insides of the house still held his father’s scent. Juochi was taken to the rock once, as a twelve-day-old baby brought to donate his tears. The keeper, Alonna, made a swift and shallow cut on Juochi’s eye bag. As Juochi wailed, the keeper collected the tears and blood with a metal spoon. Then he plugged the cut with a black substance. The substance formed the cicatrice which most of their townspeople bore on their left undereye. Juochi never grew jaded of asking his mother to repeat his donation story.
On impulse, Juochi ran his finger on his scar, and felt at once proud of it and daunted at the thought of holding a child and making the same cut.
Adanne was saying something about the walls and their corners and how every cranny in the house was an extended body part of the rock. But Juochi’s attention was rather snagged by the shapes of the walls and how some corners resembled the groove linking the nose to the mouth. He saw faint outline of fingers on the projections. He dragged his eyes over the rest of the walls. They were body parts frozen in movement. He jumped when a hand touched his shoulders. It was Okezie.
“Son, don’t go too far in thought. A soul can get lost that way,” Okezie said. Juochi loved Okezie, as did other children in Omambara. He was the only adult who tackled them in mock fights, and floored himself first, feigning defeat. However, Juochi knew that it was not the same Okezie who was standing in that room with him. The six thousand and some hundreds of lives existing in Omambara were in danger. Adanne’s well-known ardour for stone keeping was even more sharpened now. She looked hostile as her speech ran in a continuum. Maduako was mostly quiet, and only hummed in agreement with Adanne. He was the youngest of the trainers, and carried a strange silence that made people speculate that he might have other undiscovered talents apart from training keepers.
The second room of the workspace was the rock. Juochi took in the rock’s lustre, and how it was both crystalline and granular. Then, something began to unbuckle him from himself. Every connection he ever felt with pebbles didn’t compare with the way his body was being tucked away from him. He felt his feet lift from under him, even though he was still rooted in a spot. A force slowly released him back to earth.
The portal leading into the rock was shaped like a closed mouth. The key, which must be touched on the mouth to ease it open, lay by the rock like an errant pebble.
“Pick up the key,” Maduako said, pointing at the pebble. It was small and could not possibly fill up Juochi’s hand. But it didn’t budge when Juochi tried to pick it up.
“You must speak to every stone before you ask something of it. Tell it first what you need it to do,” Adanne said.
Juochi pulled at the pebble, but it was unyielding.
Adanne’s forehead pleated in worry lines. She let out an exasperated sigh as though it was insufferable to deal with Juochi’s incompetence. She rose from her stool and walked towards the room’s entrance. Her body was shaking.
Juochi felt his heart sinking.
“Adanne,” Maduako whispered, “patience, please.”
“Patience will kill more people tonight!” Adanne snapped. “If he cannot pick up a pebble, how sure are we that he will be able to…”
“Adanne, that is enough. Afa chose him and Afa does not lie.”
Tears stung Juochi’s throat and eyes. But his ability to cry had been taken away at birth. So, he stilled his breathing to contain the pain.
Okezie replaced Adanne on the vacated stool.
“Juochi, you are a keeper. There’s nothing you tell a stone that it cannot do. Only mean it when you say it. What this means is that you must have no other thoughts in your heart except that one request.”
Juochi collected his thoughts. He stripped them of Enyinnaya’s sudden death and the dire consequences that his failure would evoke for his community. He closed his eyes and saw the grainy particles which the stone contained. In his mild trance, the particles stood apart, each grain representing a separate essence. He willed them to help him. He touched the stone, and it unglued from the ground. Its sudden detachment surprised him. He tapped it on the portal and the mouth of the rock surrendered to the touch and yawned open. Whispers of approval rocked the room. Adanne and Maduako hastened to his side.
“Close your eyes. You must close your eyes to find your way,” Adanne said.
Juochi saw the start of a trail.
“Do you see the trail?” Okezie asked.
“Yes. A spider web.”
“Stay on it,” Maduako said.
Juochi’s feet adhered to the rope the moment he set his feet on it. The world in the rock was a quiet darkness which slowly became clear. The sky was moonless, and stalactites jutted from it. Silhouettes of mountains framed the distant horizon and seemed to embrace the world at every angle. He stayed on the trail until he reached a canyon.
“I see a valley filled with water.”
“The canyon of tears! He found it!” Okezie and Maduako squealed. They asked him to pause the journey and return. Okezie patted Juochi’s back when he opened his eyes. Maduako fist-bumped him. Adanne gave him a weary nod and said, “Finding the tears is one thing. Getting rid of the dead is another.”
“Adanne, he is the one,” Maduako said, going close to Adanne as if it was also part of his responsibilities to contain her tantrums.
“I never doubted he was. I’m concerned about speed.”
They announced a break. Juochi’s neck hurt from the endless craning while he concentrated on the rock. He felt weirdly satisfied, like one who finally discovered his life’s core. He ate the roasted slices of yam Maduako prepared and strolled outside. The sun’s brightness was paling to an orange colour. The day had been cut in half and his work hadn’t even started. He imagined more death tolls that night, all the hearts beating that late afternoon that would be halted when darkness descended. The hairs at the base of his hair follicles bristled. He ran back inside the house.
“I want to start sewing the veil. Can we go in now?” he asked Okezie. The older man was hunched over several shiny gems and was speaking to them. He looked up at the question.
“You need the break. The second trip will be, you know, tougher.”
“The day is almost over. I want to go in now.”
Okezie smiled.
“Son, I do not doubt for one second that you will bring us lasting peace.”
The rock easily engulfed him during the second phase. The stems of plants he saw were blackened and mouldy. Trees bowed at crooked angles. The sky remained a mass of fractured darkness. Plains appeared as if dreamed up. Horizons that resembled a trick of the eye shot up as Juochi glided closer to them. One of the features that remained unwavering was the canyon of sparkling liquid, the tears, which stagnated under the rope he traveled on. He was frightened even though he felt Okezie and Maduako’s hands on his shoulders, even though Adanne’s impatient huffing fanned the back of his head. He reached the centre where everything spun around him like a carrousel. The rope seemed to sag, lowering him closer to the tears.
“Do you see them?” Adanne asked.
“Flower hedges. No, small trees.”
“They are not flowers!”
Adanne’s words suddenly unmasked the world. The mist that wreathed what he thought were hedges unpeeled and he saw a frightening throng: figures holding on to certain aspects of their human faces, whose bodies were immersed in a weird whiteness. It reminded him of skin flash, the skin’s foremost display of defense after an injury. Juochi felt his heart yield to fear. The figures began to move towards him.
“Juochi! Have you seen them yet? Speak!”
“They are chasing me!”
“They are not chasing you! Stay still!” Adanne’s voice reached him where he swayed on the rope. The lake of tears glistened below him. He looked up and the hedge of dead people was as still as a wall. They hadn’t moved from where he had seen them. They regarded him with indifference.
They will not fight back until you attack them, a trainer’s voice said. Juochi was unsure whose. Someone nudged a small stone into his left hand. Swing the stone at them so they register your intention to fight.
“Where is the torn veil?” Juochi asked. “How do I repair it?”
“You will shove the dead people into the canyon when they push close. Their death is the repair of the veil.”
“I have to kill them?”
“Swing the stone!”
Juochi cast the stone at the legion. It plopped down with a dull sound. They didn’t move at first. Someone in the army stirred. The motion activated the rest. Their movements were protracted but certain. Attack them from above! Go for the neck! Juochi was afraid to put his hand on their bodies. But the longer he hesitated, the quicker they dispersed. Their target was on something else. His rope! He shot into the air, taking advantage of the springiness which the rope gave him. He lunged for the closest neck to him. The skin was rubbery like a skinned snake. Revulsion pimpled his skin as he plunged the head into the canyon of tears. He felt the head gurgle as it gave a faint struggle, then it stilled and crumbled. He went for the next body which was almost upon him. He dipped ten more of them and then began to use both of his hands. He held down countless heads in the canyon until his muscles knotted. His swinging slowed, but the army had begun to push back. They dovetailed into the original shapes in which he’d found them. A black film slowly shrouded them, melding them into the most natural features of that world.
It was already night when Juochi’s soul clambered back into the physical world. Okezie and Maduako’s hands seared the parts of Juochi’s shoulders which they held most of that day. Okezie walked him home while Maduako and Adanne cut into an opposite pathway. Though the night was still early, the townspeople had been cowed indoors by the invasion.
All the thoughts Juochi barred from his mind while traveling inside the rock barreled into his head as the cool night air rammed into him. His head ached as thoughts and memories clutched at him.
He thought of his father dying in his sleep some hours after concluding his day’s work. And his mother’s ragged cry when she heard. The burial was quick and happened the same night. Someone said a keeper’s body must not see the sun. Juochi was also barred from seeing his father. Keepers were not allowed to see the dead, especially their kin. A keeper who sees dead bodies will recognize them in the afterlife and might spare them. In his task of drowning the dead, he understood the danger of registering any recognition of the people they used to be while they were alive. The specifics of their faces had been blotted by death and they all looked the same. Yet, in his proximity to them, something stood out for each face. Sometimes, it was the eyes, googly or slit. Or the curve of their mouth corners as they gnawed at Juochi. He remembered Adanne’s voice and how it kept smothering his curiosity by reminding him not to look at the faces of the dead.
His new understanding of the world spun around him as the night’s wind cloaked them in an invisible shawl. He saw the dead in the wilted mass of leaves lying underneath trees. They lurked in shrubs and hedges. They stared at Juochi with an expression redolent of their defeat at his hands. Okezie laid a light arm on Juochi’s shoulders and whispered prayers as they descended the craggy pathway leading to Juochi’s house.
“Pretend you do not see them,” Okezie said. Juochi had already locked eyes with one whose face was elongated into a beak. Then, he looked away, confused at the infinite rules of his new status, which seemed to tumble out at every turn. The one Juochi had stared at dashed at them like a detached offshoot. Okezie’s hand on Juochi’s shoulders bore down heavier, and Juochi understood that they must stop. The dead twirled around Juochi and Okezie like a fish in its elements, and they, the humans, were stuck in its riverbed. It moved away when it seemed to have run out of its rage.
The shapes of the dead on land were incongruent to the versions Juochi killed in the afterlife. On land, they were mostly a pair of eyes and a twirl of smoke for neck and body. In the afterlife, they were embodied, complete.
His dinner repulsed him. The pounded yam was white and conjured in his mind the permutations of the horror he had inflicted on his dead kinsmen. He couldn’t bring himself to dig those same hands into the meal. Ijele pressed him until he acquiesced to her spooning the soup into his mouth.
By morning, Omambara thrummed with excitement. The dead had taken no life. Bodies slacked with laughter. Juochi heard the celebration coagulating into one single voice and leading to his mother’s house.
“They are coming here. Go and wash your face and clean your teeth,” Ijele said as the chanting drew closer.
“What should I say when they come?” Juochi asked her.
“Welcome them. Greet them. Thank them for their trust.”
The townspeople reenacted the songs they chanted at Juochi’s ordination. In the verses, they thanked the dead keepers for guiding their only surviving son. They thanked Alonna who descended from the loins of Obiozo, the son of Azunna; Azunna fathered by Mbele; Mbele fathered by Okwara; Okwara fathered by Nwakibie, in that order.
Juochi narrowed his guts and let out a hoarse sound that was not situated within the limitations of boyhood.
“Ndi be anyi, ekene m unu!”
“Ekene!” the townspeople roared in response. Juochi could tell that they were pleased by his voice, which wore the ranges of all the dead keepers.
He thanked them for their trust in him and assured them of their safety. Nods greeted his voice, long before the words even moulded a meaning. He saw the adults who scolded him in the past, and their eyes shone at his words. Mazi and Akuche, his friends, stood in the crowd, still children, while he, Juochi, was already circuiting this strange mineshaft of adulthood. He wondered what they’d say to one another if he ever ran into them. A thicker voice now addressed the gathered crowd. It was Adanne. He didn’t know when she got there or how long she’d been speaking.
#
“You forgot yourself after addressing the people this morning. Adanne had to take over from where you left off.” Okezie’s voice lacked the traits of blame, but concern sagged it, and made the effect of his words feel heavier. Juochi had thought briefly about his friends. He didn’t know that his thoughts severed the flow of his speech.
Maduako and Okezie worked with him that day. Adanne was away consulting Afa at a shrine. It was the sixth day and the clouds cast upon Omambara by the cry seemed to be lifting. But Okezie and Maduako didn’t seem to share the town’s excitement. They prepared Juochi for his spiritual voyage in silence, speaking only when one wanted the other to pass him cowries for Juochi’s wrists or the pebbled rope they tied around his waist.
“The dead are giving up too easily,” Okezie began as if engrossed in a monologue. “Not that we aren’t happy that they are. But they melt away as if they will reconvene and launch a fresh attack. That’s the question Adanne went to ask. We just feel that it wasn’t this easy for your father, despite his years of expertise.” Their eyes met and Okezie flinched when he understood the impact his doubts would have on Juochi. He tried to salvage the moment.
“You are our true keeper, Juochi, I have no doubt. We just feel that the pace at which things are going is a little too fast. We wonder if the dead has found another weakness in our portal.”
“What weakness?”
“The Afa may tell us if there is any. Maybe we are worrying too much. Maybe you are defeating them. You have learned everything so fast and have been working so hard. Maybe the dead has indeed left us alone.”
“Let’s not burden the boy with all that,” Maduako said from the adjoining door. He bowed his tall frame slightly to pass under the door.
“Let him know what is at stake. He is the keeper.”
“Until Adanne returns, what we claim to know is a mere speculation, isn’t it?” Maduako’s question met silence.
#
The pebble-key gripped a little to its footing before budging to Juochi’s hands.
“Peel those thoughts away. The rock needs all of you if you must occupy it,” Okezie instructed. Juochi heard a slight impatience in the voice.
He knew the trail now. It was like gliding on ice. He understood the world too; knew that a dip in the temperature meant the dead had dabbled too close to the rock’s mouth and were only held back by the canyon. It also meant he would not have to sail too far into the rock before he saw the writhing lines or figures they created with their bodies. He’d mastered how to wedge his thoughts from following him into the rock.
The world sometimes switched the background to different hues. Now, there was tall grass, grey from lack of chlorophyl but swaying despite the surrounding airlessness. Little heads belonging to dead children peeked from the culms of the grasses.
“There is grass and there are children.”
“They are tricking you.”
“They are children. I can’t.”
“They are not children!”
It didn’t take any effort to drown the children. Their heads had none of the weights lodged in the heads of the adults he held down in the canyon until the tears shut down air passages. The children giggled when he picked them up. Even when he tilted them toward the canyon, they belted an inhuman squeak, as if it was all a game. Juochi preferred working with the adult dead, but more children filled the expanse of land, toddling about on the grass and awaiting their turn. Juochi began to cry. Hands climbed his shoulders and shook him until he slid back the way he came.
When he opened his eyes, the three trainers were looking down at him. The sharp jutting of a rock onto his back made him realize that he’d fallen. Okezie pulled him to his feet and then folded him into a chair.
“Your body just went still,” Okezie said.
Adanne’s energy filled the room as she spoke:
“They are baiting you with children. Because they know that the imagination will appeal to you.” Juochi wished he could ask her what Afa said about their progress. But she went on about the children Juochi saw. “In the land of the dead, there is no child. A soul is simply a soul. Being a child or an adult are the limitations of the physical body. Those indicators do not exist in the afterlife.”
“What she’s saying,” Maduako stepped in, “is that the children you see are the same dead men you have been drowning. They change their forms to trick keepers.”
The room swelled with the tension of the conversation and then flattened. Lunch was roasted meat and pepper sauce. Juochi ate only a few chunks and could not go on. Before his second entry, Adanne drew her chair close to him. He could breathe in her tangy odour mixed with the acrid smell of smoke. A single cloth supporting her breasts spilled most of them out of the cloth fold.
“Afa reconfirmed you. We have nothing to fear. They only advise that you continue to keep your head clear of thoughts.” Adanne’s face looked wrung out by life when she smiled. The wrinkles crisscrossing her face for years were unseated for a moment, and her happy face looked frightening. Juochi didn’t know how to engage with her happiness.
That night, Ijele moved closer to her son and held him. Juochi allowed himself to be held. In the privacy of their room, they didn’t need to uphold any standards.
“The eighth market day is upon us. The dead will be defeated, and you will take a long break,” Ijele said, rocking her son gently.
“Okezie does not think that things will end soon.”
“Afa said eight market days. Afa’s messages are always clear. What did Adanne say?”
“She says eight market days. And that the dead is acknowledging defeat.”
“She never stops speaking of your speed, and how you move in that world as if it were your play field.”
“She says that?”
“She tells everyone.”
“She never tells me. I thought she didn’t like me.”
Ijele laughed.
“Praise may get into your head if it comes early. Adanne’s most important goal is to protect Omambara. You must think more of your duty than you think of being liked.”
Juochi remembered the nights Alonna ambled into his mother’s room and wondered whether this was what their conversation was like, whether his father returned heavy with an entire world’s trauma while Ijele made light of them for him.
#
Several elders convened at the mouth of his mother’s hut to bid him a glorious finishing. They brought gourds of palm wine and lobes of kola for libation prayers. Their eyes shone with the assurance that the bad season was over. By the next day, they’d return to their farmlands and till open the land. Then, they’d give it what to grow. On the way to the rock, Juochi saw yam heaps, their tendrils greening with life. The trainers said fewer and fewer words to him now. Even the reminders about having no thoughts and harbouring no compassion had grown sparse.
“It’s the finale,” Okezie said, squeezing his shoulders. On his face lay all the strain of the past four days. His undereye puffed with lack of sleep. Juochi nodded and melted into the rock.
The world was again different. Only the canyon remained in its position, sparkly as if a film of oil coated it. Instead of hedges and stalks, stalagmites had sprouted from the floor. He tried not to think of them as rocks, but as another transfiguration of the dead. Instantly, the sharp ends of the rocks smoothed into heads and edges of bodies. Something glittery zapped past him, almost piercing him in the eye. He ducked. He heaved upwards and another came. They were shards of glasses when they shattered on the rocky surfaces behind him. He swam out of their focus and veered closer to where the dead clustered. He took hold of one head after another, submerging them as he’d done for the past days. Head after head. He was not thinking.
Suddenly, one of the heads in his grip jerked backwards. The dead never resisted him; they simply surrendered. The head had slipped out of his hold and locked its eyes with Juochi’s. There was something about the eye corners, a striking familiarity. Juochi’s thoughts unspooled like a binding on a fissure. His memories gushed free. He recognized the swollen eyelid, and the fatigued expression which the few days of death had not yet taken away. It was Alonna. Juochi tried to bar his memories of the late keeper which had begun to clog his head.
A voice that held the warm timbre that was unique to Alonna, whose path was almost painful, called him, “Juo-chi.”
The tone, as well as his enunciation of the name, illuminated tracts of memory in Juochi. The head floating in the void before him may possess the features common to the dead, but Juochi knew that it was not some spirit masquerading as his father, but the very man who sired him. Juochi probed the man’s body with his eyes, hunting for the evidence of his human death, bruises marking where the dead pulled him apart. But the body was whole. Juochi’s heart shook the bars of his ribcage in fear and excitement.
The world took on a new urgent tilt. The dead repositioned themselves, piling behind the dead keeper as if summoned by his will. Juochi lunged at the nearest dead but missed because Alonna’s voice severed the tide of his movement.
“Juo-chi, we are the only two keepers of Omambara left. See how we are working together, protecting our town on her two most important sides. Isn’t this a historical moment?”
A line Adanne taught him to use if he ever encountered an argumentative dead (which the trainers claimed was unlikely) filtered into his mind. He countered Alonna:
“I am protecting the life of our land, which your kind destroys.”
Alonna chuckled. His eyes twinkled with what seemed like pride.
“And you know this difference because you are Juochi, Ijele’s boy. My own son!”
Juochi thought only of the delight swirling in his chest like water gulped in haste. Alonna’s words about making history together wrapped around him like a warm cloak. The reconfirmation that he was Alonna’s son made his head feel light. His friends should see him now. The people of Omambara should see –
Juochi felt a soft grasp around his senses. Something was confining him to the prison of his thoughts. From the topmost part of the rock, where the trainers flanked his half-conscious body, a loud voice arose and climbed along the trail.
“Juochi! What is wrong?”
The agitated voices of the trainers exploded inside his mind, and nearly whited out his father’s effect on him. Stop the thoughts! Stop the memories! They are dead, unreal. But Juochi felt stuck in a web that was both devouring and soothing. His father’s voice was unrelenting.
“Death does not put an end to kinship, son. There’s no demarcation between us except our existence in different life forms.”
Juochi wanted to ask Alonna about the life forms in Omambara, and why one form destroys the other. Together, they could brainstorm the pathway to lasting peace. Before gliding back to the living, he also wanted them to discuss the strange scribble of their lives as father and son.
“Juochi! He is dead! Drown him!” the trainers cried. But the man before Juochi had the particularities of the living. His face had a flush, as if he was about to push forth a smile or bubble up words. His body was whole, perfect, refuting the narrative of his death. Juochi imagined the father-son distance they’d cover before he returned to the real world.
The trail had become heavier, as if many hands tugged at it. The dead were on it like ants on a sugar trail. They pulled and pulled at the rope, and suddenly, the world around Juochi began to rattle. At every rattle, the ground beneath Juochi and the sky above him expanded, making space for new land and new sky. Their town and the afterlife began to crawl into each other. Juochi gaped at the transformation. Was the rift tearing? Was this annihilation? Had he failed? The rock had blasted open and widened like the maw of a large beast. The trainers walked in first, their bodies already whitened. The townspeople arrived from all sides, their skin so pale, their veins like giant sparks of lightning. None of them expressed shock or sadness. None of them scowled at Juochi like he’d feared. In fact, they marched on, mindless, as if they’d been anticipating this merging of worlds since the beginning.
###
A lifetime later, the story of Omambara’s fate tilts between fact and myth. Some literature refers to it as the fictional Baia, the city that toppled to the ocean floor. There is no physical proof of Omambara’s earthly occupancy. The land appears to have contracted after the town was subsumed into it. But Omambara’s heart still beats, and the gusts of their breathing sometimes fenestrate the material world and stir into a whirlwind of dust. When branches and bushes bow and crackle to a windless day, it is the keepers and trainers and people of Omambara moving to the cacophony of their lives in the mantle of the earth.
© Copyright 2024 Frances Ogamba
About the Author
Frances Ogamba received a 2022 CLA fellowship from the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities. Her writing has won the 2022 Diana Woods Award in Creative Nonfiction, the 2020 Kalahari Short Story Competition and the 2019 Koffi Addo Prize for Creative Nonfiction. She is a finalist for the 2019 Writivism Short Story Prize and 2019 Brittle Paper Awards for short fiction. She is a 2022 Pushcart Prize Nominee and an alumna of the Purple Hibiscus Creative Writing Workshop taught by Chimamanda Adichie.