to his success. Why should he then fear big or tall trees? He asked himself.
He feared neither witches nor spirits, who, he believed, were the projections of people's fears and hopes. If there were no witches, people would invent them to run away from what they feared or hated. If there were no robbers around, they would still imagine them to stay close to one another. It was not that he did not like people, but he wanted peace as he did his work.
Obie understood his people well enough to keep away from them. They cheered you on, only to abandon you. They called you, only to turn away as soon as you faced them. They drew you close, only to kick you away. He did not want them to complain of disturbance, as they did over women pounding yam late at night. It did not matter to any of such whining men when the woman returned from the distant market; the men still condemned her for preparing food late for her family and disturbing their peace. And yet her husband would wait for her to come home and prepare food for him before taking his supper. As for drunken men who desecrated night's serene spirit with cacophonous and meaningless songs, no man saw such as a disturbance. To them it was only the busy and dutiful wife who disturbed the peace of the night with her pestle as she prepared food to feed her children and her baby of a husband.
Obie interrogated himself before his decision to live far away from the crowd. Would people not curse him for disturbing their sleep? Would they not grumble when he kept himself busy? Would they not be the first to pelt him with insults for being a wood sculptor instead of being a farmer or a fisherman?
There was nothing you did in Okpara without complaints. You could not satisfy an entire town or people. Even if you killed yourself to protect or save them, they would say you were a fool and did not value your own life anyway. You had to be careful dealing with people that could not be pleased in any way. Nothing could be taken for granted. They could grow used to his type of noise; they could, but they might not. And if they did not get used to him, the trouble would then begin. Would he uproot his house to plant it elsewhere? But that was not possible. From the beginning he had to find a place where he would live his life and do his work peacefully. And this distant place provided him the peace he much needed.
As a carver, he had to be free to work whenever his tools called upon him to wield them. He could wake from a dream and jump to take his tools to work and reflect his vision on wood before it faded away. He had to seize whatever image every moment provided him. He might be called when everybody else was asleep, and he would have to answer the call of inspiration at the oddest of times rather than wait for some other time. Answering the call for him as a carver meant making noise. He had to seize the moment whenever an idea or feeling came to him to create something with his wood. He could go to bed blank and suddenly wake filled with motifs he had to register on wood.
He could receive inspiration at anytime and would, for the sake of others, not fail to respond to an important call. He must cut wood, knock the wood with his tools as he fitted parts together. There was no way a woodcarver, dedicated to his work, could avoid making noise. Most of his neighbours would not understand why he disturbed them. Some would even invent reasons as to why he kept them from sleep with hammer blows as if he himself did not like to sleep or could not sleep and so wanted others to suffer the same insomniac's fate with him. He would then be a nuisance to them.
A quiet, rather shy man, Obie had become famous all over Agbon for his admirable carvings. Who thought that an Agbon person could carve better than the pampered carvers of Benin? The Oba paid those ones in cash and kind. Benin carvers were important chiefs and always enjoyed the valued patronage of the Oba. In Agbon, Obie was highly respected but had not gained the status conferred on Benin carvers. He admitted to himself that he had been wrong about his people in one aspect. They often commissioned him to do many works for them despite his initial fear that they might not patronize him. Widely known beyond his initial expectations, his problem was not of customers; he had more than enough commissions to occupy him all year round. He had the bigger problem of having his tasks completed by the time expected of him.
Clients came from distant towns in Agbon to seek his expertise. Once they described to him what they wanted, he went on to produce what surpassed their expectations. He intuitively knew more than his customers really wanted for themselves. He translated the idea into wood, and wood and idea got fused into a beautiful figure. His finished works were so real that, even before they were taken away, they appeared to be breathing the ancestor, god, or spirit represented.
He took his fame calmly and always told customers who praised him that he was still learning.
“Learning what?” they would ask.
“Nobody knows the whole thing,” he would say.
“Only God you would say, but God lends you his perfect hand.”
“God helps me. What I do is beyond me.”
The carver spent much of the day attending to Okpara's matters and taking new orders and giving back what he had produced. Priests and priestesses came to him. He often said jokingly that he served uncountable gods and goddesses. Every sect came to him to carve their god. Nobody had seen a god or a goddess but each deity must be given a physical shape to be installed in a shrine for adoration.
Very active in the community, Obie worked like an ant at night. Many wondered when he slept. He was seen in most places where his age-grade could be seen during the day. However, at night people woke to hear from a distance the sound of his tools. His hammer blows tore through the thin tendons of night and the distant echo made tender waves in the air. When did he sleep? Like a crab, he had never been caught sleeping. But he slept like every other person; only that he did so at odd hours. He often took short naps during the day to make up for lost sleep at night.
He worked either standing or sitting on a low wooden stool; his tools spread on the floor of his workroom, which looked like a shrine. It was a shrine with shadows of gods but no priests. Each carving was mere wood until consecrated in the very shrine of the priest. But already completed works had the aura of their gods. Once he started, he worked himself in a frenzy to complete orders as if, were he to stop, he would no longer know how to complete the work. Sometimes he stopped when he failed to hear from inside him what should be done. Obie took every carving as if it were the last he would do and gave it all his attention and energy. He was patient with his work because he knew that once the completed carving was taken away, it would tell much about his skill. He believed in the best at all times. He did not have a preference among his customers. Once he accepted a work, no matter from whom, he aimed at the best he could accomplish. He knew that some works were greater than others, but small and big commissions needed his energy and skill to realize in as perfect a form as possible.
Driven by his tools, he worked and worked until he had drained himself of the secret power that had possessed him. Then he would sleep in the workroom, which was suffused with the aura of the spirits that would be invoked into the masks and figurines. It was as if the ancestors or spirits stalked the wooden works he produced. He spent more time in his workroom than in his main house. The room was crammed with many things, but in that confusion he knew where he placed everything he needed. He always aimed at clearing the room or giving it some semblance of neatness and order, but he never got to achieve this aim. One commission after another, wood on wood, he saw the workroom as a reflection of life. Not everything one wished to do could be completed in a lifetime, he mused. He had a mat, which he rolled out whenever he wanted to steal some time off his work, as he put it.
He talked to himself, hummed and groaned, as he wielded his double-bladed axe, double-edged knives, scrounges, and sandpaper leaves. He rubbed ant-repelling herbs on his woodwork. He told the wood what he was going to do—raise it from mere wood to a godly status. He positioned the wood for the exercise. In their quiet exchange, the tools did the bidding of his hands, which obeyed some secret power that gave them insight and strength.
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