Chigozie Obioma - The Fishermen

A moment of silence followed in which Father fixed his eyes on one object — the floor, the ceiling, curtain, anything, as if asking these things to be witnesses of the despicable thing he’d just heard. While the silence lasted, I let my eyes wander around the room. I looked from Boja’s football jersey that hung beside the door, to the wardrobe, to the single calendar on the wall. We named it M.K.O. calendar because it had four of us and M.K.O. Abiola, Nigeria’s former presidential contestant, in it. I spotted a dead cockroach — possibly killed in a rage — whose maxillae were now flattened against the worn yellow carpet. This reminded me of the effort we’d made to find the video game Father hid from us, something that would have kept us from fishing. We’d searched our parents’ room one day to find the game while Mother was out with the little ones, but it was nowhere — not in Father’s cabinet, not in any of the uncountable chests of drawers in the room. Then we brought down Father’s old metal box, the one he said our grandmother bought for him the first time he left the village for Lagos in 1966. Ikenna was sure it’d be there. We carried the iron box out, which was heavy as a casket, to Ikenna and Boja’s room. Then Boja diligently tried all the keys until, creaking, the lid snapped open. As they were carrying it, a cockroach who had crawled out from the box, scampered atop the rusting metal and flew off. When Ikenna opened it, the dark-red insects invaded the room. In the twinkling of an eye, a cockroach was on the louvres, one was creeping head-down at the door of the wardrobe, and another was crawling into Obembe’s sneaker. With a cry, my brothers and I made a stampede on the thousand cockroaches for nearly thirty minutes, trying to chase them as they scurried about. Then we carried the box out. After we swept the room clean of the cockroaches, and Obembe lay back on the bed, I saw under his feet the charred bits of cockroaches: a stray hind, a mashed flattened head with jarred eyes, and fragments of detached wings, some even in the space between his toes and a yellow paste that must have been squeezed out from the thorax of the insects. One lay whole under his left foot, flattened to the thickness of paper, its wings doubled and flared.

My mind, like a spinning coin, stilled when Father, in an unusually calm voice, said, “So, Adaku, you sit here and tell me in all truth that my boys — Ikenna, Bojanonimeokpu, Obembe, Benjamin — were the ones she saw at that river; that dangerous river under a curfew, where even adults are known to have disappeared?”

“Indeed, Dim, it was your sons she saw,” she replied in English because Father had suddenly begun speaking in English, and had emphasized the last syllable of the word “disappeared” by a high pitch.

“Gracious me!” Father cried repeatedly in quick succession so that the syllables split and the two words came out as Gra-cious-me, like the sound produced when one taps on a metal surface.

“What is he doing?” Obembe asked, teetering on the brink of tears.

“Will you shut up?” Ikenna raged in a low voice. “Didn’t I warn you to stop fishing? But you all chose to listen to Solomon. Now here’s the result.”

Father had said, “So you really mean it was my boys she saw?” while Ikenna was speaking, and now, we heard Mother say “Yes.”

“Gracious me!” Father cried even louder now.

“They are all inside,” said Mother, “just ask them, and you will see for yourself. To think they actually bought fishing equipment, hooks, lines, and sinkers with the pocket money you gave them, makes it all the more devastating.”

Mother’s emphatic knock on the phrase “with the pocket money you gave them” stung deep into Father’s flesh. He must have coiled up like a prodded worm.

“How long did they do this?” he asked. Mother, trying to shield herself from blame, hesitated at first, until Father barked, “Am I talking to a deaf and mute?”

“Three weeks,” she submitted in a voice that was defeated.

“Good gracious! Adaku. Three weeks. With you under the same roof?”

That was a lie, though. We had told Mother that it was three weeks only with hopes that that would minimize the weight of our offense. But even that inaccurate information was enough to thaw Father’s wrath.

“Ikenna!” he bellowed, “Ike-nna!”

Ikenna sprang to his feet from the floor where he’d sat when Mother began to give Father the report. At first, he made for the door, then stopped, stepped back and felt his buttocks. He’d doubled his pair of shorts to reduce the impact of what was to come, although he, like the rest of us, knew it was most likely Father would give us the blows on our bare skin. He now raised his head and cried, “Sir!”

“Come out here at once!”

With freckles scattered over his face like buboes, Ikenna moved forward again, stopped as if an invisible barrier had suddenly massed in his way, then rushed out.

“Before I count to three,” Father shouted, “all of you come out here. Now!”

We hared out of the room at once, and formed a backcloth behind Ikenna.

“I suppose you all heard what your mother told me,” Father said, a long line of veins gathered on his forehead. “Is it true?”

“It is true, sir,” Ikenna answered.

“So — it is true?” Father said, his eyes momentarily pinned to Ikenna’s sunken face.

He did not wait for an answer; he went to his room in a rage. My eyes had fallen on David, who’d sat in one of the lounges gazing at us, a packet of biscuits in his hand as he braced to watch us getting whipped, when Father returned with two cowhides, one flung across his shoulder, and the other clenched in his grip. He pulled the small table, on which he’d had his meal, to the centre of the room. Mother, who had just cleared and cleaned it with a rag, fastened her wrappa around her bosom as she waited for that moment when she would feel Father had taken his punishment too far.

“Each of you will spread like a mat on this table,” Father said. “You will each receive your Guerdon on your bare flesh, the way you came into this sinful world. I sweat and suffer to send you to school to receive a Western education as civilized men, but you chose instead to be fishermen. Fish-a-men!” He shouted the word repeatedly as if it were anathema to him, and when he’d said it the umpteenth time, he ordered Ikenna to spread out on the table.

The beating was severe. Father made us number the blows as they landed. Ikenna and Boja, sprawled across the table with their shorts rolled down, counted twenty and fifteen each, while Obembe and I counted eight apiece. Mother tried to intervene, but was deterred by Father’s stern warning that if she interfered, she would receive the beating with us. And perhaps, given the weight of his anger, he may have meant it. Father had gone on, unmoved by our screams and shouts and cries and Mother’s pleas, railing about how he worked to make money and spitting the word “fishermen” with fury until he retired to his room, his cowhide slung on his shoulder, and we held the seats of our pants, wailing.

The night of the Guerdon was a cruel night. Like my brothers, I had refused to have dinner despite being hungry and lured by the aroma of fried turkey and plantains — a rarity which Mother, knowing pride would not allow us to eat and hoping to punish us the more, had made. In fact, dodo (fried plantains) had not been made in our house in a long time before then. Mother had banned it a year or so earlier after Obembe and I stole pieces from Mother’s cooler, and lied that we’d seen rats eating the dodos. I’d yearned desperately to sneak out of the room to pick one of the four plates on which Mother had dished out our portions from the kitchen, but I would not for fear I would betray what my brothers intended to be a hunger strike. This unsatisfied hunger had intensified my pain so that I had cried late into the night, until I drifted off into sleep.