When my spirit cannot cry any more tears, I spit the cloth from my mouth, sniff up my nose. Tomorrow will come. Nothing I can do about that. I lie down and close my eyes. Open it again. Close it. Open it. There is a sound beside me, a shaking. Kayus?
I sit up, touch him soft, say, “Kayus, everything all right?”
But my baby brother, he just slap off my hand as if I pinch him with two hot fingers. He pick hisself up from his mat, kick off his slippers from the floor, and run outside in the dark before I can think to ask him what is chasing him.
So I sit there and listen: to the sound of his feet as it is kicking the door outside of our room.
Kick. Kick. Kick.
I listen to his voice, the sad and angry of it, as he is screaming my name over and over again. And I listen to Papa, who is shouting a curse from his sleep and telling Kayus to pick one: keep shut his noise-making mouth or come to the parlor to collect a nice, hot flogging. So I drag myself from my mat and find Kayus in the outside, sitting on the floor with his back to our bedroom wall. He is rubbing his left feet with his hands, rubbing and crying and crying and rubbing.
I low myself to him, pluck his hand from his feet and hold it tight. Then I pull him close, and together, we stay like that, saying nothing, until he fall into a deep sleep with his head on my shoulders.
CHAPTER 6
My wedding be like a movie inside the tee-vee.
My eyes was watching myself as I was kneeling down in front of my father, as he was saying a prayer to be following me to my husband house, as my mouth was opening, my lips parting, my voice saying “Amen” to the prayers even though my mind was not understanding what is happening to me.
I was looking everything from under the white lace cloth covering my face: the womens and mens standing in our compound under the mango tree, all of them wearing the same style of blue cloth with no shoe; the old man drummer holding a talking-drum under his armpit, pulling the rope on the side of the drum and banging a stick on the face of it, gon! gon! gon!; my friends Enitan and Ruka, laughing, dancing, singing. I was looking all the food: the palm oil rice and fish and yam and dodo; Coca-Cola and kunu and zobo drink for the womens, palm wine and schnapps gin and stout and strong ogogoro for the mens; bowls of choco-sweets for the small childrens.
My eyes was watching myself as Morufu was putting his finger inside a small clay pot of honey and lifting up the cloth to press the honey-finger on my forehead three times, saying, “Your life will be sweet like this honey from today.”
I keep looking, even when Morufu lie down and press his head to the floor in front of Papa seven times and Papa collect my hand, cold and dead, and put it inside Morufu’s own and say, “This is your wife now, from today till forever, she is your own. Do her anyhow you want. Use her till she is useless! May she never sleep in her father house again!” and everybody was laughing and saying, “Congra-lations! Amen! Congra-lations!”
My eyes was just watching myself, watching as the picture of schooling that I put on top a table in my heart was falling to the floor and scattering into small, small pieces.
* * *
As Morufu is driving his taxi-motor away from our compound, he is putting his hand outside the window and shouting, “Thank you-o! Thank you-o!” to the peoples lining the road to the left and right of us, waving us bye-bye and wishing us good home.
I am sitting beside him in the car, my head down to my chin, my eyes on the henna Enitan drawed on my hand this morning and thinking how it is resembling what my mind is feeling: plenty twisting and turning of a thin black road so that it is looking beautiful from the afar, but when you look it well, then you are seeing all the confusions.
“You feeling fine?” Morufu ask when there are no more peoples on the side of the road, when it is just trees and bushes on our left and right side; when, outside, the world is turning, and darkness is now where the sun use to be, and the sky is just a big blue cloth with plenty shine-shine holes inside it. A breeze is blowing my face, and another bride, a happy bride, will be full of smiles now, looking the stars and thinking how she is having lucky to be marrying. But me, I am keeping my head down, trying to be locking the tears behind my eyeslids so it will stay inside my eyes and not come out. I don’t want to cry in front of this man. I never, never want to show him any feeling of me.
“You are not answering me?” Morufu say, cutting the road to the left, and soon we are nearing the areas that is close to the village border. “Come on! Look me!”
I push up my head.
“Good, very good,” he say. “Because you are now a married woman. My wife. The other two wifes in the house, what is their name again? Yes, Labake and Khadija, they will be jealousing you. Khadija is having small sense, but Labake, she will want to make you to be sad. You will not allow her, you hear? If Labake do you anyhow, talk you one kind, call me and I will flog her very well.”
My head is not understanding why he wants to flog his wifes. Will he flog me when I do bad?
“Yes, sah,” I say. The stupid tears is not behaving hisself. It is running down my cheeks.
“Eh. Am I hearing your tears?” He remove the wedding fila from his head and throw it to the back seat.
“You are sad?” he ask and I nod my head yes, because I am praying it will make him pity me and he will slow down on one side of the road and tell me sorry, it is a big mistake and he is not wanting to wife me again, but he sniff his nose and say, “You better wipe that tears and begin to laugh. You know how much it is costing me to marry you today? You better open your teeth for me now and start to be laughing. Come on! Why are you looking at me? Did I kill your father? Are you deaf in the ear? I say OPEN!”
I open my teeths, feel as if I tear my face.
“Very good,” he say. “Be laughing. Be happy. A new wife is always happy.”
We are driving like two mad peoples, me showing my teeths, and him talking to hisself about how he was paying thousands and thousands of naira for bride-price until we pass the junction beside Ikati bakery, and the smell of rising bread is filling my nose and making me to think of Mama. We pass the village mosque, where there are peoples coming out from the iron gate of the mosque: mens wearing white jalabiya, holding prayer beads and plastic kettles, and womens covering their heads with hijab, all of them walking as if something is chasing them.
After nearly twenty minutes of driving from our house, Morufu cut a turn by Ikati canteen, drive enter inside a compound that is big like one half a football field, a cement house in the middle of it. The house is dark, no light in the four windows. There is no door in front, just a short wooden gate. In front of it, a curtain is flapping in the stiff evening wind. Morufu bring his car to a stop near a guava tree with branch that look like a man’s hand, the leafs on it spreading out over the compound like too many fingers on the hand. I see there is another car in the compound, green, a blue nylon bag instead of glass in one of windows in the back.