My head been stoning my mind with many questions since this morning, questions that are not having answers. What is it meaning, to be the wife of a man with two wifes and four childrens? What is making Morufu to want another wife on top the already two? And Papa, why is he wanting to sell me to a old man with no any thinking of how I am feeling? Why didn’t he keep the promise he make to Mama before she dead?
I rub my chest, where the too many questions is causing a sore, climb to my feets with a sigh, and walk to the window. Outside, the moon is red, hanging too low the sky, be as if God pluck out His angry eye and throw it inside our compound.
There are fireflies in the air this night, their body is flashing a light of many colors: green and blue and yellow, every one of them dancing and blinking in the dark. Long ago, Mama tell me that fireflies are always bringing good messages to peoples at night. “A firefly is the eyesballs of a angel,” she say. “See that one there, the one perching on the leaf of that tree, Adunni. That one be bringing a message of moneys for us.” I didn’t sure what message that firefly was wanting to bring that long time ago, but I know it didn’t bring no money.
When Mama was dead, a light off itself inside of me. I keep myself in that dark for many months until one day Kayus find me in the room where I was sorrowing and weeping, and with his eyes round, full of fear, he beg me to stop my crying because my crying is causing him a heart pain.
That day, I pick up my sorrow and lock it in my heart so that I can be strong and care for Kayus and Papa. But sometimes, like today, the sorrow climb out of my heart and stick his tongue in my face.
When I close my eyes on some days, I see my mama as a rose flower: a yellow and red and purple rose with shining leafs. And if I sniff a deep sniff, I can catch her smell too. That sweet smell of a rosebush sitting around a mint tree, of the coconut soap in her hair just after a washing at Agan waterfalls.
My mama was having long hair which she will plait with black threads and roll around her head like a thick rope, looking like two or three small tires around her head. Sometimes she will remove the threads, let the hair climb down to her back so that I can brush it with her wooden brush. Sometimes, she will take the brush from my hand, make me to sit on a bench in the outside by the well, and twist up my own hair with so much coconut oil that I go about the whole village smelling like a frying food.
She didn’t old, my mama, only forty-something years of age before she die, and every day I feel a paining in my spirit for her quiet laugh and voice, for the soft of her arms, for her eyes that say more things than her mouth ever speak.
She didn’t sick for too long, thank God. Just six and half months of coughing and coughing until the cough eat up her whole flesh and make her shoulders be like the handle of our parlor door.
Before that devil sickness, Mama was always keeping busy. Always doing the-this and the-that for the everybody in the village. She will fry one hundred puff-puffs every day to sell in Ikati market, sometimes picking fifty of it, the best of the gold-brown ones from the hot oil, and tell me to take it to Iya, one old woman living in Agan village.
I didn’t too sure of how Iya and Mama are knowing each other, or what is her real name because “Iya” is a Yoruba word for old woman. All I know is my mama was always sending me to give food to Iya and all the older womens who are sick in the village around Ikati: hot amala and okra soup with crayfish or beans and dodo, the plantain soft, oily.
One time, I bring puff-puff to Iya, after Mama was too sick to travel far, and when I reach home that night and ask Mama why she keep sending food to peoples when she is feeling too sick to travel far, Mama say, “Adunni, you must do good for other peoples, even if you are not well, even if the whole world around you is not well.”
It was Mama who show me how to pray to God, to put thread in my hair, to wash my cloth with no soap, and to change my under-cloth when my monthly visitor was first coming.
My throat tight itself as I hear her voice in my head now, the faint and weak of it, as she was begging Papa to don’t give me to any man for marriage if she die of this sickness. I hear Papa’s voice too, shaking with fear but fighting to be strong as he was answering her: “Stop this nonsense dying talk. Nobody is dying anything. Adunni will not marry any man, you hear me? She will go to school and do what you want, I swear to you! Just do quick and better yourself!”
But Mama didn’t do quick and better herself. She was dead two days after Papa make that promise, and now I am marrying a old man because Papa is forgetting all the things he make promise to Mama. I am marrying Morufu because Papa is needing moneys for food and community rent and nonsense.
I taste the salt of my tears at the memorying of it all, and when I go back to my mat and close my eyes, I see Mama as a rose flower. But this rose is no more having yellow and red and purple colors with shining leafs. This flower be the brown of a wet leaf that suffer a stamping from the dirty feets of a man that forget the promise he make to his dead wife.
CHAPTER 3
I didn’t able to sleep all night with all the sorrowing and memorying.
At first cock crow, I don’t climb to my feets to begin my everyday sweeping or washing cloth or grinding beans for Papa’s morning food. I lie there on the mat and keep my eyes close and listen to all the noise around me. I listen to the crying of a cock in the afar, a deep mourning cry; to the blackbirds in our mango tree singing their happy, every-morning song. I listen as far away, somebody, a farmer maybe, is hitting a ax at the buttocks of a tree; hitting, hitting, hitting. I listen as brooms are making a swish on the floor in one compound, as one mama in another compound is calling her childrens to wake up and go baff, to use the water in the clay pot and not the one in the iron bucket.
The sounds are the same every morning, but today, every sound is a blow to the heart, a wicked reminding that my wedding is drawing close.
I sit up. Kayus is still sleeping on his mat. His eyes are close but he look like he is having two minds about waking up. He been doing this shaking of his eyeslids in a struggle since the day we bury Mama, throwing his head left and right and shaking his eyeslids. I move near to him, press my palm on his eyeslids, and sing a soft song in his ear until he keep hisself still.
Kayus is only eleven years of age. He use to bad behaving many times, but he has my heart. It is me Kayus come to and cry when the boys in the village square was laughing him and calling him cat-fighter because Kayus, he was all the time sick as a child, so Papa take him to one place and they use razor blade to slash on his cheeks three times this way and that, a mark to chase away the spirit of sickness. When you are seeing Kayus, it is as if he was in a fight with a big cat, and the cat use his nails to scratch Kayus on his cheeks.
It is me that was teaching Kayus all the schoolwork I know, the Plus and Minus and Science and, most of all, the English, because Papa is not having school fees moneys for even Kayus too. It was me that tell him his futures is bright if only he can push hisself to learn.