Papa-Nnukwu was sitting on a low stool on the verandah, bowls of food on a raffia mat before him. He rose as we came in. A wrapper was slung across his body and tied behind his neck, over a once white singlet now browned by age and yellowed at the armpits.
“Neke! Neke! Neke! Kambili and Jaja have come to greet their old father!” he said. Although he was stooped with age, it was easy to see how tall he once had been. He shook Jaja’s han
d and hugged me. I pressed myself to him just a moment longer, gently, holding my breath because of the strong, unpleasant smell of cassava that clung to him.
“Come and eat,” he said, gesturing to the raffia mat. The enamel bowls contained flaky fufu and watery soup bereft of chunks of fish or meat. It was custom to ask, but Papa-Nnukwu expected us to say no—his eyes twinkled with mischief.
“No, thank sir,” we said. We sat on the wood bench next to him. I leaned back and rested my head on the wooden window shutters, which had parallel openings running across them.
“I hear that you came in yesterday,” he said. His lower lip quivered, as did his voice, and sometimes I understood him a moment or two after he spoke because his dialect was ancient; his speech had none of the anglicized inflections that ours had.
“Yes,” Jaja said.
“Kambili, you are so grown up now, a ripe agbogho. Soon the suitors will start to come,” he said, teasing. His left eye was going blind and was covered by a film the color and consistency of diluted milk. I smiled as he stretched out to pat my shoulder; the age spots that dotted his hand stood out because they were so much lighter than his soil-colored complexion.
“Papa-Nnukwu, are you well? How is your body?” Jaja asked.
Papa-Nnukwu shrugged as if to say there was a lot that was wrong but he had no choice. “I am well, my son. What can an old man do but be well until he joins his ancestors?” He paused to mold a lump of fufu with his fingers. I watched him, the smile on his face, the easy way he threw the molded morsel out toward the garden, where parched herbs swayed in the light breeze, asking Ani, the god of the land, to eat with him. “My legs ache often. Your Aunty Ifeoma brings me medicine when she can put the money together. But I am an old man; if it is not my legs that ache, it will be my hands.”
“Will Aunty Ifeoma and her children come back this year?” I asked.
Papa-Nnukwu scratched at the stubborn white tufts that clung to his bald head. “Ehye, I expect them tomorrow.”
“They did not come last year,” Jaja said.
“Ifeoma could not afford it.” Papa-Nnukwu shook his head. “Since the father of her children died, she has seen hard times. But she will bring them this year. You will see them. It is not right that you don’t know them well, your cousins. It is not right.”
Jaja and I said nothing. We did not know Aunty Ifeoma or her children very well because she and Papa had quarreled about Papa-Nnukwu. Mama had told us. Aunty Ifeoma stopped speaking to Papa after he barred Papa-Nnukwu from coming to his house, and a few years passed before they finally started speaking to each other.
“If I had meat in my soup,” Papa Nnukwu said, “I would offer it to you.”
“It’s all right, Papa-Nnukwu,” Jaja said.
Papa-Nnukwu took his time swallowing his food. I watched the food slide down his throat, struggling to get past his sagging Adam’s apple, which pushed out of his neck like a wrinkled nut. There was no drink beside him, not even water. “That child that helps me, Chinyelu, will come in soon. I will send her to go and buy soft drinks for you two, from Ichie’s shop,” he said.
“No, Papa-Nnukwu. Thank sir,” Jaja said.
“Ezi okwu? I know your father will not let you eat here because I offer my food to our ancestors, but soft drinks also? Do I not buy that from the store as everyone else does?”
“Papa-Nnukwu, we just ate before we came here,” Jaja said. “If we’re thirsty, we will drink in your house.”
Papa-Nnukwu smiled. His teeth were yellowed and widely spaced because of the many he had lost. “You have spoken well, my son. You are my father, Ogbuefi Olioke, come back. He spoke with wisdom.”
I stared at the fufu on the enamel plate, which was chipped of its leaf-green color at the edges. I imagined the fufu, dried to crusts by the harmattan winds, scratching the inside of Papa-Nnukwu’s throat as he swallowed. Jaja nudged me. But I did not want to leave; I wanted to stay so that if the fufu clung to Papa-Nnukwu’s throat and choked him, I could run and get him water. I did not know where the water was, though. Jaja nudged me again and I still could not get up. The bench held me back, sucked me in. I watched a gray rooster walk into the shrine at the corner of the yard, where Papa-Nnukwu’s god was, where Papa said Jaja and I were never to go near. The shrine was a low, open shed, its mud roof and walls covered with dried palm fronds. It looked like the grotto behind St. Agnes, the one dedicated to Our Lady of Lourdes.
“Let us go, Papa-Nnukwu,” Jaja said, finally, rising.
“All right, my son,” Papa-Nnukwu said. He did not say “What, so soon?” or “Does my house chase you away?” He was used to our leaving moments after we arrived. When he walked us to the car, balancing on his crooked walking stick made from a tree branch, Kevin came out of the car and greeted him, then handed him a slim wad of cash.
“Oh? Thank Eugene for me,” Papa-Nnukwu said, smiling. “Thank him.”
He waved as we drove off. I waved back and kept my eyes on him while he shuffled back into his compound. If Papa-Nnukwu minded that his son sent him impersonal, paltry amounts of money through a driver, he didn’t show it. He hadn’t shown it last Christmas, or the Christmas before. He had never shown it. It was so different from the way Papa had treated my maternal grandfather until he died five years ago. When we arrived at Abba every Christmas, Papa would stop by Grandfather’s house at our ikwu nne, Mother’s maiden home, before we even drove to our own compound. Grandfather was very light-skinned, almost albino, and it was said to be one of the reasons the missionaries had liked him. He determinedly spoke English, always, in a heavy Igbo accent. He knew Latin, too, often quoted the articles of Vatican I, and spent most of his time at St. Paul’s, where he had been the first catechist. He had insisted that we call him Grandfather, in English, rather than Papa-Nnukwu or Nna-Ochie. Papa still talked about him often, his eyes proud, as if Grandfather were his own father. He opened his eyes before many of our people did, Papa would say; he was one of the few who welcomed the missionaries. Do you know how quickly he learned English? When he became an interpreter, do you know how many converts he helped win? Why, he converted most of Abba himself! He did things the right way, the way the white people did, not what our people do now! Papa had a photo of Grandfather, in the full regalia of the Knights of St. John, framed in deep mahogany and hung on our wall back in Enugu. I did not need that photo to remember Grandfather, though. I was only ten when he died, but I remembered his almost-green albino eyes, the way he seemed to use the word sinner in every sentence.
“Papa-Nnukwu does not look as healthy as last year,” I whispered close to Jaja’s ear as we drove off. I did not want Kevin to hear.
“He is an old man,” Jaja said.
When we got home, Sisi brought up our lunch, rice and fried beef, on fawn-colored elegant plates, and Jaja and I ate alone. The church council meeting had started, and we heard the male voices rise sometimes in argument, just as we heard the up-down cadence of the female voices in the backyard, the wives of our umunna who were oiling pots to make them easier to wash later and grinding spices in wooden mortars and starting fires underneath the tripods.