He slept very little that night. His father had not appeared as difficult as he had expected. He had not been won over yet, but he had clearly weakened. Obi felt strangely happy and excited. He had not been through anything quite like this before. He was used to speaking to his mother like an equal, even from his childhood, but his father had always been different. He was not exactl
y remote from his family, but there was something about him that made one think of the patriarchs, those giants hewn from granite. Obi’s strange happiness sprang not only from the little ground he had won in the argument, but from the direct human contact he had made with his father for the first time in his twenty-six years.
As soon as he woke up in the morning he went to see his mother. It was six o’clock by his watch, but still very dark. He groped his way to her room. She was awake, for she asked who it was as soon as he entered the room. He went and sat on her bed and felt her temperature with his palm. She had not slept much on account of the pain in her stomach. She said she had now lost faith in the European medicine and would like to try a native doctor.
At that moment Obi’s father rang his little bell to summon the family to morning prayers. He was surprised when he came in with the lamp and saw Obi already there. Eunice came in wrapped up in her loincloth. She was the last of the children and the only one at home. That was what the world had come to. Children left their old parents at home and scattered in all directions in search of money. It was hard on an old woman with eight children. It was like having a river and yet washing one’s hands with spittle.
Behind Eunice came Joy and Mercy, distant relations who had been sent by their parents to be trained in housekeeping by Mrs. Okonkwo.
Afterwards, when they were alone again, she listened silently and patiently to the end. Then she raised herself up and said: “I dreamt a bad dream, a very bad dream one night. I was lying on a bed spread with white cloth and I felt something creepy against my skin. I looked down on the bed and found that a swarm of white termites had eaten it up, and the mat and the white cloth. Yes, termites had eaten up the bed right under me.”
A strange feeling like cold dew descended on Obi’s head.
“I did not tell anybody about that dream in the morning. I carried it in my heart wondering what it was. I took down my Bible and read the portion for the day. It gave me some strength, but my heart was still not at rest. In the afternoon your father came in with a letter from Joseph to tell us that you were going to marry an osu. I saw the meaning of my death in the dream. Then I told your father about it.” She stopped and took a deep breath. “I have nothing to tell you in this matter except one thing. If you want to marry this girl, you must wait until I am no more. If God hears my prayers, you will not wait long.” She stopped again. Obi was terrified by the change that had come over her. She looked strange as if she had suddenly gone off her head.
“Mother!” he called, as if she was going away. She held up her hand for silence.
“But if you do the thing while I am alive, you will have my blood on your head, because I shall kill myself.” She sank down completely exhausted.
Obi kept to his room throughout that day. Occasionally he fell asleep for a few minutes. Then he would be woken up by the voices of neighbors and acquaintances who came to see him. But he refused to see anybody. He told Eunice to say that he was unwell from long traveling. He knew that it was a particularly bad excuse. If he was unwell, then surely that was all the more reason why he should be seen. Anyway, he refused to be seen, and the neighbors and acquaintances felt wounded. Some of them spoke their mind there and then, others managed to sound as if nothing had happened. One old woman even prescribed a cure for the illness, even though she had not seen the patient. Long journeys, she said, were very troublesome. The thing to do was to take strong purgative medicine to wash out all the odds and ends in the belly.
Obi did not appear for evening prayers. He heard his father’s voice as if from a great distance, going on for a very long time. Whenever it appeared to have finished, his voice rose again. At last Obi heard several voices saying the Lord’s Prayer. But everything sounded far away, as voices and the cries of insects sound to a man in a fever.
His father came into his room with his hurricane lamp and asked how he felt. Then he sat down on the only chair in the room, took up his lamp again and shook it for kerosene. It sounded satisfactory and he turned the wick down, until the flame was practically swallowed up in the lamp’s belly. Obi lay perfectly still on his back, looking up at the bamboo ceiling, the way he had been told as a child not to sleep. For it was said if he slept on his back and a spider crossed the ceiling above him he would have bad dreams.
He was amazed at the irrelevant thoughts that passed through his mind at this the greatest crisis in his life. He waited for his father to speak that he might put up another fight to justify himself. His mind was troubled not only by what had happened but also by the discovery that there was nothing in him with which to challenge it honestly. All day he had striven to rouse his anger and his conviction, but he was honest enough with himself to realize that the response he got, no matter how violent it sometimes appeared, was not genuine. It came from the periphery, and not the center, like the jerk in the leg of a dead frog when a current is applied to it. But he could not accept the present state of his mind as final, so he searched desperately for something that would trigger off the inevitable reaction. Perhaps another argument with his father, more violent than the first; for it was true what the Ibos say, that when a coward sees a man he can beat he becomes hungry for a fight. He had discovered he could beat his father.
But Obi’s father sat in silence, declining to fight. Obi turned on his side and drew a deep breath. But still his father said nothing.
“I shall return to Lagos the day after tomorrow,” Obi said finally.
“Did you not say you had a week to spend with us?”
“Yes, but I think it will be better if I return earlier.”
After this there was another long silence. Then his father spoke, but not about the thing that was on their minds. He began slowly and quietly, so quietly that his words were barely audible. It seemed as if he was not really speaking to Obi. His face was turned sideways so that Obi saw it in vague profile.
“I was no more than a boy when I left my father’s house and went with the missionaries. He placed a curse on me. I was not there but my brothers told me it was true. When a man curses his own child it is a terrible thing. And I was his first son.”
Obi had never heard about the curse. In broad daylight and in happier circumstances he would not have attached any importance to it. But that night he felt strangely moved with pity for his father.
“When they brought me word that he had hanged himself I told them that those who live by the sword must perish by the sword. Mr. Braddeley, the white man who was our teacher, said it was not the right thing to say and told me to go home for the burial. I refused to go. Mr. Braddeley thought I spoke about the white man’s messenger whom my father killed. He did not know I spoke about Ikemefuna, with whom I grew up in my mother’s hut until the day came when my father killed him with his own hands.” He paused to collect his thoughts, turned in his chair, and faced the bed on which Obi lay. “I tell you all this so that you may know what it was in those days to become a Christian. I left my father’s house, and he placed a curse on me. I went through fire to become a Christian. Because I suffered I understand Christianity—more than you will ever do.” He stopped rather abruptly. Obi thought it was a pause, but he had finished.
Obi knew the sad story of Ikemefuna who was given to Umuofia by her neighbors in appeasement. Obi’s father and Ikemefuna became inseparable. But one day the Oracle of the Hills and the Caves decreed that the boy should be killed. Obi’s grandfather loved the boy. But when the moment came it was his matchet that cut him down. Even in those days some elders said it was a great wrong that a man should raise his hands against a child that called him father.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
Obi did the 500-odd miles between Umuofia and Lagos in a kind of daze. He had not even stopped for lunch at Akure, which was the normal halfway house for travelers from Eastern Nigeria to Lagos, but had driven numbly, mile after mile, from morning till evening. Only once did the journey come alive, just before Ibadan. He had taken a sharp corner at speed and come face to face
with two mammy-wagons, one attempting to overtake the other. Less than half a second lay between Obi and a total smash. In that half-second he swerved his car into the bush on the left.
One of the lorries stopped, but the other went on its way. The driver and passengers of the good lorry rushed to see what had happened to him. He himself did not know yet whether anything had happened to him. They helped him push his car out, much to the joy of the women passengers who were already crying and holding their breasts. It was only after Obi had been pushed back to the road that he began to tremble.
“You very lucky-o,” said the driver and his passengers, some in English and others in Yoruba. “Dese reckless drivers,” he said shaking his head sadly. “Olorun!” He left the matter in the hands of God. “But you lucky-o as no big tree de for dis side of road. When you reach home make you tank your God.”
Obi examined his car and found no damage except one or two little dents.
“Na Lagos you de go?” asked the driver. Obi nodded, still unable to talk.