A cock was crowing, a drawn-out, plaintive sound that seemed very close close by.
“Chineke! Bless me. Let me find enough to fill my stomach. Bless my daughter, Ifeoma. Give her enough for her family.” He shifted on the stool. His navel had once jutted out, I could tell, but now it looked like a wrinkled eggplant, drooping.
“Chineke! Bless my son, Eugene. Let the sun not set on his prosperity. Lift the curse they have put on him.” Papa-Nnukwu leaned over and drew one more line. I was surprised that he prayed for Papa with the same earnestness that he prayed for himself and Aunty Ifeoma.
“Chineke! Bless the children of my children. Let your eyes follow them away from evil and towards good.” Papa-Nnukwu smiled as he spoke. His few front teeth seemed a deeper yellow in the light, like fresh corn kernels. The wide gaps in his gums were tinged a subtle tawny color. “Chineke! Those who wish others well, keep them well. Those who wish others ill, keep them ill.” Papa-Nnukwu drew the last line, longer than the rest, with a flourish. He was done.
When Papa-Nnukwu rose and stretched, his entire body, like the bark of the gnarled gmelina tree in our yard, captured the gold shadows from the lamp flame in its many furrows and ridges. Even the age spots that dotted his hands and legs gleamed. I did not look away, although it was sinful to look upon another person’s nakedness. The rumples in Papa-Nnukwu’s belly did not seem so many now, and his navel rose higher, still enclosed between folds of skin. Between his legs hung a limp cocoon that seemed smoother, free of the wrinkles that crisscrossed the rest of his body like mosquito netting. He picked up his wrapper and tied it around his body, knotting it at his waist. His nipples were like dark raisins nestled among the sparse gray tufts of hair on his chest. He was still smiling as I quietly turned and went back to the bedroom. I never smiled after we said the rosary back home. None of us did.
PAPA-NNUKWU WAS BACK on the verandah after breakfast, sitting on the stool, with Amaka settled on a plastic mat at his feet. She scrubbed his foot gently with a pumice stone, soaked it in a plastic bowl of water, rubbed it over with Vaseline, and then moved to the other foot. Papa-Nnukwu complained that she would make his feet too tender, that even soft stones would pierce his soles now because he never wore sandals in the village, though Aunty Ifeoma made him wear them here. But he did not ask Amaka to stop.
“I am going to paint him out here on the verandah, in the shade. I want to catch the sunlight on his skin,” Amaka said, when Obiora joined them.
Aunty Ifeoma came out, dressed in a blue wrapper and blouse. She was going to the market with Obiora, who she said figured out change faster than a trader with a calculator. “Kambili, I want you to help me do the orah leaves, so I can start the soup when I come back,” she said.
“Orah leaves?” I asked, swallowing.
“Yes. Don’t you know how to prepare orah?”
I shook my head. “No, Aunty.”
“Amaka will do it, then,” Aunty Ifeoma said. She unfolded and refolded her wrapper around her waist, knotting it at her side.
“Why?” Amaka burst out. “Because rich people do not prepare orah in their houses? Won’t she participate in eating the orah soup?”
Aunty Ifeoma’s eyes hardened—she was not looking at Amaka, she was looking at me. “O ginidi, Kambili, have you no mouth? Talk back to her!”
I watched a wilted African lily fall from its stalk in the garden. The crotons rustled in the late morning breeze. “You don’t have to shout, Amaka,” I said, finally. “I don’t know how to do the orah leaves, but you can show me.” I did not know where the calm words had come from. I did not want to look at Amaka, did not want to see her scowl, did not want to prompt her to say something else to me, because I knew I could not keep up. I thought I was imagining it when I heard the cackling, but then I looked at Amaka—and sure enough, she was laughing.
“So your voice can be this loud, Kambili,” she said.
She showed me how to prepare the orah leaves. The slippery, light green leaves had fibrous stalks that did not become tender from cooking and so had to be carefully plucked out. I balanced the tray of vegetables on my lap and set to work, plucking the stalks and putting the leaves in a bowl at my feet. I was done by the time Aunty Ifeoma drove in, about an hour later, and sank onto a stool, fanning herself with a newspaper. Sweat streaks had washed away her pressed powder in parallel lines of darker-colored skin down the sides of her face. Jaja and Obiora were bringing in the foodstuffs from the car, and Aunty Ifeoma asked Jaja to place the bunch of plantains on the verandah floor.
“Amaka, ka? Guess how much?” she asked.
Amaka stared at the bunch critically before she guessed an amount. Aunty Ifeoma shook her head and said that the plantains had cost forty naira more than what Amaka guessed.
“Hei! For this small thing?” Amaka shouted.
“The traders say it is hard to transport their food because there is no fuel, so they add on the costs of transportation, o di egwu,” Aunty Ifeoma said.
Amaka picked up the plantains and pressed each between her fingers, as if she would figure out why they cost so much by doing that. She took them inside just as Father Amadi drove in and parked in front of the flat. His windscreen caught the sun and glittered. He bounded up the few stairs to the verandah, holding his soutane up like a bride holding a wedding dress. He greeted Papa-Nnukwu first, before hugging Aunty Ifeoma and shaking hands with the boys. I extended my hand so that we could shake, my lower lip starting to tremble.
“Kambili,” he said, holding my hand a little longer than the boys’.
“Are you going somewhere, Father?” Amaka asked, coming onto the verandah. “You must be baking in that soutane.”
“I am going over to give some things to a friend of mine, the priest who came back from Papua New Guinea. He returns next week.”
“Papua New Guinea. How did he say the place is, eh?” Amaka asked.
“He was telling a story of crossing a river by canoe, with crocodiles right underneath. He said he is not sure which happened first, hearing the teeth of the crocodiles snapping or discovering that he had wet his trousers.”
“They had better not send you to a place like that,” Aunty Ifeoma said with a laugh, still fanning herself and sipping from a glass of water.
“I don’t even want to think about your leaving, Father,” Amaka said. “You still don’t have an idea where and when, okwia?”
“No. Sometime next year, perhaps.”