Chigozie Obioma - The Fishermen

She shook her head.

“You have to be cleansed from every evil spell Abulu has cast on you. We are all going to the service at the church this evening. So, no one goes anywhere else today,” Mother said. “Once it’s four, we will all go to the church.”

David’s playful laughter came from Mother’s room, where she’d left him with Nkem, and occupied the silence created after Mother delivered her speech and watched us to make sure her words had sunk into our heads.

She rose and was heading to her room, when she stopped abruptly because of something Ikenna said. She turned back sharply: “ Eh? ” she said. “Ikenna, isi gini ? — What did you say?”

“I said I’m not going to church with you today for any cleansing,” Ikenna replied, switching back to Igbo. “I can’t bear to stand in front of that congregation and have people looming over me, trying to cast out some spell.” He stood up briskly from the lounge. “I mean, I just don’t want it. I don’t have any demon; I’m fine.”

“Ikenna, have you lost your mind?” said Mother.

“No, Mama, but I just don’t want to go there.”

“What?” Mother shouted. “Ike-nna?”

“It’s the truth, Mama,” he replied. “I just don’t want”—he shook his head—“I just don’t, Mama, biko— please, I don’t want to go to any church.”

Boja, who had not spoken to Ikenna since their altercation concerning the television programme, rose to his feet and said: “Me neither, Mama. I won’t go for any cleansing. I don’t feel I or anyone needs deliverance from anything. I’m not going there.”

Mother was about to say something, but the words tripped backwards in her throat like a man falling from the top of a ladder. She gazed back and forth between Ikenna and Boja with an expression of shock.

“Ikenna, Bojanonimeokpu, have we taught you nothing? Do you want that madman’s prophecy to come true?” Spittle formed a weak bubble across the ridges of her left-open mouth, and busted when she made to speak again. “Ikenna, look at how you’ve already taken it. What do you think is the cause of all your misbehaviours if not because you believe your brothers will kill you? And now, you stand here, face me, and tell me you don’t need prayers — that you don’t need to be cleansed? Have the many years of training, and efforts by Eme and I taught neither of you nothing? Ehh? ”

Mother shouted the last question with her hands thrust histrionically aloft. Yet, with a resolve that could have smashed gates of iron, Ikenna said: “I will not go is all I know,” Boja said. And apparently encouraged by Boja’s support, he walked back to his room. Once he shut his room’s door Boja rose and went in the opposite direction — to the room Obembe and I shared. Mother, wordless, sat back in the lounge and sank beneath the surface of the filled pot of her own thoughts, her arms clasped around her and her mouth moving as if she were saying something that had Ikenna’s name in it, although inaudible. David threw a ball about with clattering steps, laughing aloud as he tried to make the sound of football stadium spectators all by himself. He was shouting when Obembe moved to sit with Mother.

“Mama, Ben and I will go with you,” he said.

Mother looked up at him with eyes clouded with tears.

“Ikenna… and Boja… are strangers now,” she stammered, shaking her head. Obembe drew closer to her and as he patted her shoulder with his thin long arms, she repeated: “Strangers, now.”

For the rest of that day till when we left for the church, I sat thinking about it all, how this vision was the cause of everything Ikenna had done to himself and the rest of us. The encounter with Abulu was something I had forgotten, especially after it happened, when Boja warned that Obembe and I should never mention it to anyone. When I asked Obembe once, why Ikenna no longer loved us, he had said it was because of the whipping Father gave us. And I had believed him, but now, it became very clear to me that I had been wrong.

Later, as I waited for Mother to dress and take us to the church, I cast my eyes on the columned shelf in the sitting room. My eyes then fell on the column that was covered in a quilt of dust, a cobweb strewn to the end of it. These were signs of Father’s absence. When he was at home, we used to take weekly turns at cleaning the shelves. We stopped a few weeks after he left and Mother had not been able to effectively enforce it. In Father’s absence, the perimeters of the house seemed to have magically widened as though invisible builders unclasped the walls, like they would a paper house, and expanded its size. When Father was around, even if his eyes were fastened to the pages of a newspaper or book, his presence alone was enough to enforce the strictest order and we maintained what he often referred to as “decorum” in the house. As I thought of my brothers’ refusal to come with us to church to break what might be a spell, I craved for Father, and wished, strongly, that he would return.

That evening, Obembe and I followed Mother to our church, the Assemblies of God Church situated across the long road that stretched to the post office. Mother held David in one hand and fastened Nkem to her back with a wrappa . To prevent them from sweating and getting skin rashes, she’d powdered their necks so that they shone like masquerades. The church was a big hall with lights that hung in long lines from the four corners of its ceiling. At the pulpit, a young woman in a white gown, who was very much fairer than a typical African of these parts, sang “Amazing Grace” with a foreign accent. We sidled in between two rows of people, most of whom kept locking eyes with me until I got the feeling that we were being watched. My suspicion increased when Mother went up behind the pulpit where the Pastor and his wife and elders were seated, and whispered in the Pastor’s ear. When the singer was done, the Pastor mounted the podium, dressed in a shirt and tie, his trousers strapped with suspenders.

“Men and brethren,” he started in a voice so loud it made the speakers near our row go irrecoverably mute so that we had to pick up his voice from the speaker on the other side of the room. “Before I go ahead with the word of God tonight, let me say that I’ve just been told that the devil, in the form of Abulu, the demon-possessed, self-proclaimed prophet whom all of you know has caused so much damage to people’s lives in this town, has been to the house of our dear brother James Agwu. You all know him, the husband of our dear sister here, sister Paulina Adaku Agwu. Some of you here know that he has many children, who, our sister told us, were caught fishing at the Omi-Ala at Alagbaka Street.”

A faint murmur of surprise rang through the congregation.

“Abulu went to those children and told them lies,” Pastor Collins continued, his voice rising as he spat his words furiously into the microphone. “Brethren, you all know that if a prophecy is not from God, it is of—”

“The devil!” the congregation shouted in unison.

“True. And if it is of the devil, then it has to be refuted.”

“Yes!” they chorused.

“I didn’t hear you,” the Pastor spat into the microphone, shaking his fist. “I said if it is of the devil, then it MUST be—”

“Refuted!” the congregation yelled with so much vigour it seemed like a battle cry. From around the congregation, little children — including Nkem, perhaps frightened by the roar — burst out wailing.

“Are we ready to refute it?”

The congregation roared in agreement, with Mother’s voice resounding above all, and trailing after the rest had stopped. I looked at her and saw that she’d begun to cry again.