Papa looked unexpectedly pleased with what Aunty Ifeoma had said. He nodded slowly. “When do you plan to go?”
“Sometime in January, before the children resume school.”
“Okay. I will call you when we get back to Enugu to arrange for Jaja and Kambili to go for a day or two.”
“A week, Eugene, they will stay a week. I do not have monsters that eat human heads in my house!” Aunty Ifeoma laughed, and her children reproduced the throaty sounds, their teeth flashing like the insides of a cracked palm kernel. Only Amaka did not laugh.
THE NEXT DAY was a Sunday. It did not seem like a Sunday, maybe because we had just gone to church on Christmas day. Mama came into my room and shook me gently, hugged me, and I smelled her mint-scented deodorant.
“Did you sleep well? We are going to the earlier Mass today because your father has a meeting right afterward. Kunie, get into the bathroom, it’s past seven.”
I yawned and sat up. There was a red stain on my bed, wide as an open notebook.
“Your period,” Mama said. “Did you bring pads?”
“Yes.”
I barely let the water run over my body before I came out of the shower, so that I would not delay. I picked out a blue-and-white dress and tied a blue scarf around my head. I knotted it twice at the back of my neck and then tucked the ends of my cornrows underneath. Once, Pap
a had hugged me proudly, kissed my forehead, because Father Benedict told him that my hair was always properly covered for Mass, that I was not like the other young girls in church who let some of their hair show, as if they did not know that exposing your hair in church was ungodly.
Jaja and Mama were dressed and waiting in the living room upstairs when I came out. Cramps racked my belly. I imagined someone with buckteeth rhythmically biting deep into my stomach walls and letting go. “Do you have Panadol, Mama?”
“Cramps abia?”
“Yes. My stomach is so empty, too.”
Mama looked at the wall clock, a gift from a charity Papa donated to, oval shaped and embossed with his name in gold lettering. It was 7:37. The Eucharist fast mandated that the faithful not eat solid food an hour before Mass. We never broke the Eucharistic fast; the table was set for breakfast with teacups and cereal bowls side by side, but we would not eat until we came home.
“Eat a little corn flakes, quickly,” Mama said, almost in a whisper. “You need something in your stomach to hold the Panadol.”
Jaja poured the cereal from the carton on the table, scooped in powdered milk and sugar with a teaspoon, and added water. The glass bowl was transparent, and I could see the chalky clumps the milk made with the water at the bottom of the bowl.
“Papa is with visitors, we will hear him as he comes up,” he said.
I started to wolf the cereal down, standing. Mama gave me the Panadol tablets, still in the silver-colored foil, which crinkled as I opened it. Jaja had not put much cereal in the bowl, and I was almost done eating it when the door opened and Papa came in.
Papa’s white shirt, with its perfectly tailored lines, did little to minimize the mound of flesh that was his stomach. While he stared at the glass bowl of corn flakes in my hand, I looked down at the few flaccid flakes floating among the clumps of milk and wondered how he had climbed the stairs so soundlessly.
“What are you doing, Kambili?”
I swallowed hard. “I…I…”
“You are eating ten minutes before Mass? Ten minutes before Mass?”
“Her period started and she has cramps—” Mama said.
Jaja cut her short. “I told her to eat corn flakes before she took Panadol, Papa. I made it for her.”
“Has the devil asked you all to go on errands for him?” The Igbo words burst out of Papa’s mouth. “Has the devil built a tent in my house?” He turned to Mama. “You sit there and watch her desecrate the Eucharistic fast, maka nnidi?”
He unbuckled his belt slowly. It was a heavy belt made of layers of brown leather with a sedate leather-covered buckle. It landed on Jaja first, across his shoulder. Then Mama raised her hands as it landed on her upper arm, which was covered by the puffy sequined sleeve of her church blouse. I put the bowl down just as the belt landed on my back. Sometimes I watched the Fulani nomads, white jellabas flapping against their legs in the wind, making clucking sounds as they herded their cows across the roads in Enugu with a switch, each smack of the switch swift and precise. Papa was like a Fulani nomad—although he did not have their spare, tall body—as he swung his belt at Mama, Jaja, and me, muttering that the devil would not win. We did not move more than two steps away from the leather belt that swished through the air.
Then the belt stopped, and Papa stared at the leather in his hand. His face crumpled; his eyelids sagged. “Why do you walk into sin?” he asked. “Why do you like sin?”
Mama took the belt from him and laid it on the table.
Papa crushed Jaja and me to his body. “Did the belt hurt you? Did it break your skin?” he asked, examining our faces. I felt a throbbing on my back, but I said no, that I was not hurt. It was the way Papa shook his head when he talked about liking sin, as if something weighed him down, something he could not throw off.