Julie Iromuanya - Mr. and Mrs. Doctor

In the parlor, his junior brother, Obi, and his father accepted guests who came to pay their respects. Clay walls and stiff leather furniture made up the room. Three knotted curtains of muted pastels blocked out the fierce sunlight. An air conditioner blasted cold, ragged air into the room. Each voice shouted to be heard over the sound of the air.

Among the visitors were a man and his boy, a relative of a relative, someone Job only knew vaguely, someone who had come to show his respects to the man who was celebrated up and down the street and in church once a year when they received his annual endowment. Clearly, the son was suffering from bowlegs. The father insisted that it was something more.

“Doctor, he walks like k-leg, k-leg,” the man said, turning his legs out. “He sleeps with pain.”

The boy’s hair was all tough, tight curls. He was thin, with gangly limbs and a belly like a ripe melon. He had arrived in his best slacks, and now he held them bunched at his knees.

Job leaned heavily into his father’s low leather couch and beckoned. The boy came forward, and Job ran his fingers along the length of the boy’s legs. He looked nothing like Victor, half his size and nearly a foot taller, yet Job recognized in his shy smile the same pleasurable unruliness as his own Victor. He imagined the boy’s skinny legs ducking in and out of the housegirls’ thick calves as they prepared meals in the kitchen. He could see the boy dumping bowls of rice, upturning roots in the garden, yanking the braids of his sisters’ fresh and tender scalps. It nearly broke his heart even to examine him. Job took a deep breath and began, casting aside the images from that night.

He asked the boy to spread his arms, and Job patted him down. He asked the boy to walk on his tiptoes, to jump, to kick. The boy did everything, his knees buckled from his bowed legs.

Job produced his stethoscope and listened for the boy’s rabbit heartbeat. He told the father, “His heart is slow. It is not the boy’s legs. You must feed him coconut milk.”

“Yes, yes.” The father nodded solemnly.

But Job didn’t stop there. He sat back in the chair pensively, then tilted forward, arching his eyebrows in seriousness. “The coconut milk must be fresh. Not in a can. The enzymes will thicken his arteries so that they can pass more blood throughout his body. His body is thirsty for blood. Especially there.” He indicated the misshapen legs.

The father agreed. “Yes, the enzymes.”

“And,” Job could not resist, “tell the boy’s mother and his sisters that he must be left in peace if his legs are to grow properly.”

“ Eh? ”

“Let the boy play,” Job said softly.

By evening, the arrival of guests had temporarily waned. Job escaped the parlor and disappeared into the dark hallway dividing the main quarters from the boys’ quarters at the back of the house. A tall portrait was positioned on the wall. With thick eyebrows and vicious eyes, his brother was no more than nineteen years of age in the photo. Standing before the portrait, Job trembled. Samuel’s eyes probed his with distaste. He laughed at the briefcase in Job’s hand. Doctor, the voice said mockingly, it is not even real leather. What a grand pretender you are.

On the drive to the village in Abba, Jenny sighed and shouted her praises of Ifi. She wrapped her sharpened fingertips around Job’s hands. “Don’t mind, my brother. She is mourning. Our Jesus will not leave us.”

But later, as he washed his face over the bathroom sink of the chapel, he overheard her in the hallway. Her voice overtook those of other parishioners. “Why my senior brother married such a woman, I do not know. He had many choices. A mother who will not bury her own son, oh. This is Satan. A-ah! This is abomination.”

Jenny’s accomplices were other thirty-something women, fully regaled in ichafu headscarves, long dresses, and wrappers of various prints. His sister stood out among them in a tailored western suit. Job clutched Jenny at the elbow and led her away from the women. Flashing a sympathetic smile to her friends, she followed him to the other end of the hallway. Low overhanging bulbs elongated their shadows. A pool of light poured in through the exit door.

“You are insulting my wife?” Job asked.

“What is this?”

Job turned his body to block the streams of parishioners making their way into the chapel. “She is not well. It’s not her fault. Can’t you see?”

“Not well, oh. That is speaking lightly,” she said. “Do not deny it, brother. She is onye ara.”

“Don’t speak of my wife in that way.”

“This woman, who was as poor as a church rat, you take her to America and make her a queen, and it spoils her brain. But don’t worry, my brother,” Jenny said. “We will find you a new wife.”

“She is a good woman,” Job said, suddenly reminded of his great joy in seeing Ifi smile. We will have another child, he told himself. We will go to another city. We will begin all over again.

“Your wife is a liar,” Jenny said. “Imagine this rubbish woman calling the day the son of my senior brother will be buried. Imagine such a woman calling to disgrace her husband. Imagine such a woman calling the father of her husband to share such lies. I tell you, this is Satan. I am not surprised if it is not juju that made you marry this woman.”

“What are you talking about?” Job asked.

“I do not need to repeat such nonsense,” Jenny said.

His forehead swirled. Already he knew the answer.

“But if you must force me, I will tell you.” Jenny looked around and bowed toward him. “She says that you are no doctor. She says you wipe the ass of diseased Americans. That you do not even have a first degree.”

In silence, Job took it all in. He swallowed a deep breath through his nostrils. He could only listen.

“I never liked that woman,” Jenny said, resuming her normal volume. “With her big nose and flat buttocks. It was juju. But don’t worry, my brother. We will find you a new wife.”

What could he say in defense of such a charge, of such a glaring fact? At once he hated Ifi for her truths and hated his sister for so completely believing his lies. At the same time, the ache in Job’s chest swelled into a feeling caught between hate and love. How could she expose me? he thought. Suddenly remembering the look on her face that night as she watched Job’s slippery fingers lose their grip on Victor’s life, Job bristled at the accusation in her expression.

A hand clutched at Job’s elbow. His heart thudded in his ears. He started to push the figure away, but he heard his father’s voice. “Bia, come,” his father said, “the service will begin.”

With great difficulty, Job followed.

The service took place in a cooled chapel filled with those Job had known nearly his entire life and those he barely knew at all. Stunned into silence, Job felt the absence of the most important person of all, Ifi, and the shame began to crystallize into hate. As Victor was eulogized, the air conditioner rattled in the background between bursts of loud air. The pastor was a red-faced white man, no doubt commissioned by Job’s family on behalf of Doctor. The pastor pronounced Victor’s full name slowly, with difficulty. With the correct pronunciation, Job repeated his son’s name in his head: Victorious Ezeaku Ogbonnaya. His first son, who was supposed to grow to be the victorious king Job could never be for his own father.

He thought of Samuel. Samuel had been careless. He was the first son. He was not supposed to try to be the hero. He should have left the heroism for Job, the second son, the one who could make mistakes and be forgiven. But now, forever, Samuel would be nothing more than a set of accusatory eyes in a portrait, aged no more than nineteen years. Samuel would live forever in all of Job’s failures.