Chigozie Obioma - The Fishermen

“Wrong idea,” Boja said. “What if those sons of hers, those big hungry boys who always dress in tattered clothing with biceps like Arnold Schwarzenegger, catch and beat us?” He demonstrated the bulge of their brawny biceps.

“They will beat us even worse than Father,” Ikenna noted.

“Yes,” said Boja, “we can only imagine it.”

Ikenna nodded in agreement. I was now the only one who hadn’t made a suggestion.

“Ben, what do you have to say?” Boja said.

I gulped, my heart beating faster. My confidence often wilted when my older brothers urged me to make a decision rather than make one for me. I was still thinking when my voice, as if autonomous of the rest of me, said: “I have an idea.”

“Then say it!” Ikenna ordered.

“Okay, Ike, okay, I suggest we get hold of one of the roosters and,” I fastened my eyes to his face, “and—”

“Yes?” Ikenna said. Their eyes were all fixed on me as if I’d just become a wonder.

“Behead it,” I concluded.

I had barely said those words when Ikenna cried, “That is really fatal!” and Boja, suddenly wild-eyed, started clapping.

My brothers gave me credit for an idea whose source was a folktale my Yoruba language teacher had told my class at the beginning of the term, about a vicious boy who goes on a rampage decapitating all the cocks and hens in the land. We hurried out of our compound with a covert path to the woman’s house in our minds, passing small bushes and a carpenter’s shop, where we had to close our ears with our hands to shield them against the deafening sound of the filling machines as they sawed wood. The woman, Iya Iyabo, lived in a small bungalow whose exterior was identical to ours: a small balcony, two windows with louvres and nettings, an electric meter box clamped to the wall, and a storm door, except that her fence was not made of bricks and cement but of mud and clay. The fence was cracked in places from long exposure to the sun, and was littered with spots and smears. An overhead electric cable reached through the branches of one of the trees and stretched out of the compound to connect to a high power pole.

We listened at first for sounds of life, but Ikenna and Boja soon concluded the compound was empty. At Ikenna’s command, Obembe climbed over the fence, using Ikenna’s shoulder as a ledge. Boja joined him while I stayed with Ikenna to keep watch. Just after the two of them climbed in, the sound of a rooster squawking and frantically flapping its wings came ever closer, as did the sounds of my brothers’ feet chasing the cock. It happened repeatedly until we heard Boja say “Hold it still, hold it still, and don’t let it go” the way we used to speak when our hooks angled a fish when we were still fishing the Omi-Ala.

At the shout, Ikenna tried to climb the fence quickly to see if they’d caught it, but stopped short of that. From behind the wall, he echoed Boja’s words. “Don’t let it go, don’t let it go.” His buttocks slipped up above the waistline of his pants as he planted his foot in a hole on the fence. Old coatings rained down below him like dust. With one foot secured, he pulled himself upwards, holding on to the top of the wall. From behind his hand, a skink rose and journeyed away in agitation, its multi-coloured body smooth and shiny. Half of him stretched into the compound, and half outside, Ikenna took the rooster from Boja, crying, “That’s my boy! That’s my boy!”

We returned to our own compound and went straight to the garden in the backyard, the size of a quarter of a football field. It was fenced around with cement bricks on all three corners, two of them marking off the boundaries with our neighbours — Igbafe’s family on one side, and the Agbatis on the other. The third, which faced our bungalow directly, marked off a boundary with the landfill where a colony of swine lived. A pawpaw tree stretched out of the landfill, just over the fence, while a tangerine tree — usually extremely leafy in the rainy season — stood agelessly between the fence and the well in the compound. This tree sat just about fifty metres further inside the compound from the well — a big hole in the ground, with a neck made of concrete around it. Attached to the concrete was a metal lid that Father locked with a padlock in dry seasons when wells dried up in Akure and people stole into our compound to fetch water. On the other side of the backyard, patched to a corner of the fence bordering Igbafe’s family’s compound was the small garden in which Mother planted tomatoes, corn and okra.

Boja set the petrified cock down on the chosen spot, and took the knife that Obembe had brought from our kitchen. Ikenna joined him and together they held the chicken in place, unshaken by its loud squawks. Then we all watched as the knife moved in Boja’s hand with unaccustomed ease, a downward slit through the rooster’s wrinkled neck as if he’d handled the knife several times before, and as if he were destined to handle it yet again. The cock twitched and made aggravating movements that were restrained by all our hands holding it firmly. I looked over our fence to the top floor of the two-storeyed building overlooking our compound and saw Igbafe’s grandfather, a small man who had stopped speaking after an accident a few years earlier, seated on the large veranda in front of the door of the house. He had the habit of sitting there all day and he used to be the butt of our jokes.

Boja severed the cock’s head, leaving a jolting outpouring of blood in its wake. I turned away and returned my eyes to the old mute man. He appeared like a moment’s vision of a faraway warning angel whose warnings we could not hear owing to the distance. I did not see the rooster’s head fall into the small hole Ikenna had dug in the dirt, but I watched as its trunk palpitated violently, spurting blood about, its wings raising dust. My brothers held it down even more firmly until it gradually quieted. Then we set off with the headless corpse in Boja’s grip, the blood marking our trail, unshaken by the few people who looked on in awe. Boja flung the dead rooster over the fence, blood spitting around as it careered in the air. Once it was out of sight, we felt satisfied we had had our revenge.

Ikenna’s frightening metamorphosis did not, however, begin then; it began long before Father’s Guerdon, and even before the neighbour caught us fishing at the river. It first showed itself in an attempt to make us hate fishing, but this was fruitless, for the love of fishing had been wired into the arteries of our hearts at the time. In his frail effort, he dug up everything he deemed bad about the river, things we had never before observed. He complained, just a few days before the neighbour caught us, that the bush around the river was filled with excreta. Although we had never seen anyone do this, nor even perceived the odour he so painstakingly described to us, Boja, Obembe and I did not argue with him. He said at one point that Omi-Ala’s fish were polluted, and stopped us from bringing the fish into his room. Hence, we began keeping them in the room I shared with Obembe. He even complained he had seen a human skeleton floating underneath the waters of the Omi-Ala while fishing, and that Solomon was a bad influence. He said these things as if they were undeniable truths newly discovered, but the passion we’d developed for fishing had become like liquid frozen in a bottle and could not be easily thawed. It was not that we did not have reservations about the enterprise; we all did. Boja hated that the river was small and only contained “useless” fish; Obembe had troubles with what the fish did at night since there’s no light under the water, in the river. How, he frequently wondered, did the fish move about — since they did not have electricity or lanterns — in the pitch black darkness that covered the river like a sheet at night; and I detested the weakness of the smelts and tadpoles, how they died so easily even when you stored them in the river’s water! This frailty sometimes made me want to cry. When Solomon came knocking the following day, the day the neighbour caught us, Ikenna had insisted at first that he would not go to the river with him. But when he saw that we, his brothers, were leaving without him, he joined in, taking his fishing line from Boja. Solomon and the rest of us cheered him, hailing him a most valiant “Fisherman.”