she was not hungry. So I insisted that she should have a bottle of Maltina. After she went home, there was nothing left to do. The car had been fixed, plates washed and dinner was ready, even though I knew by then that Akin would not be home until midnight. I could not delay thinking about Funmi any longer.
I went through several possibilities, from beating her to a pulp the next time she showed up in the salon to asking her to move in with us so I could keep her close enough to have my eye on her at all times. It did not take long to realise that the ultimate solution had little to do with her. I simply had to get pregnant, as soon as possible, and before Funmi did. It was the only way I could be sure I would stay in Akin’s life.
I believed I was Moomi’s favourite daughter-in-law. As a child, it was expected that I would call my stepmothers Moomi, even my father encouraged me to, but I refused. I stuck to calling them Mama. And whenever my father was not around, some of the women would slap me just because I refused to honour them by calling them ‘my mother’. I did not refuse because I was being stubborn or trying to defy them as a number of them concluded. My mother had become an obsession for me, a religion, and the very thought of referring to another woman as Mother seemed sacrilegious, a betrayal of the woman who had given up her life for me to live.
One year, the Anglican Church my family attended celebrated Mothering Sunday with a special service. After the vicar delivered his sermon, he summoned everyone who was below the age of eighteen to the front of the church because he wanted us to honour mothers with a song. I must have been twelve at the time, but I didn’t get up until an usher poked me in the back. We sang a song that everyone already knew, an expansion of a popular saying. I managed the first line, Iya ni wura, iya ni wura iyebiye ti a ko le f’owo ra, before biting my tongue to choke back tears. The words, Mother is gold, Mother is treasured gold that cannot be bought with money, resonated with me more than any homily I’d ever heard. I knew by then that my mother could not be replaced with money, by a stepmother or anyone else, and I was sure I would never call any woman ‘Moomi’.
Yet every time Akin’s mother wrapped me in her fleshy embrace, my heart sang Moomi and when I called her the venerated title, it did not cling to my throat and refuse to climb out the way it used to when my stepmothers tried to slap it out of me. She lived up to the name, taking my side if any issue I had with Akin came to her attention, assuring me that it was a matter of time before I got pregnant for her son, insisting that my miracle would be waiting once I turned the right corner.
When Mrs Adeolu, a pregnant customer, told me about the Mountain of Jaw-Dropping Victory, I went to Moomi that same day to discuss it with her. I needed her to authenticate the information; she was a treasure-house of knowledge about such things. Even if she did not know anything about a miracle house, she usually knew whom to ask and once she had checked out the stories, she was always prepared to accompany me to the ends of the earth to seek out a new solution.
There was a time when I would have ignored Mrs Adeolu’s words, a time when I did not believe in prophets who lived on mountains or priests who worshipped beside rivers. That was before I had so many tests done in the hospital and every one of them showed that there was nothing preventing me from getting pregnant. I hoped at one point that the doctors would find something wrong, anything to explain why my period still showed up every month, years after my marriage. I wished they would find something they could treat or cut out. They found nothing. Akin also went in to get tested and came back saying that the doctors had found nothing wrong with him. Then I stopped waving aside my mother-in-law’s suggestions, stopped thinking that women like her were uncivilised and a little crazy. I became open to alternatives. If I was not getting what I wanted in one place, what was wrong with searching elsewhere?
My parents-in-law lived in Ayeso, an old section of town that still had a few mud houses. Their house was a brick building, with a front yard partially enclosed by a low cement fence. When I arrived at the house, Moomi was sitting on a low stool in the front yard shelling groundnuts into a rusty tray that sat on her lap. She looked up as I approached and looked down again. I swallowed and my steps slowed. There was something wrong.
Moomi always greeted me by shouting Yejide, my wife. The words were as warm as the embrace that usually followed them.
‘Good evening, Moomi.’ My knees trembled as they touched the concrete floor.
‘Are you pregnant now?’ She said without looking up from the tray of groundnuts.
I scratched my head.
‘Are you barren and deaf too? I say, are you pregnant? The answer is either, yes, I am pregnant or no, I still haven’t been pregnant for a single day in my life.’
‘I don’t know.’ I stood up and backed away until she was not within the reach of my clenched fist.
‘Why won’t you allow my son to have a child?’ She slapped the tray of groundnuts on the floor and stood up.
‘I don’t manufacture children. God does.’
She marched towards me and spoke when her toes were touching the tips of my shoes.
‘Have you ever seen God in a labour room giving birth to a child? Tell me, Yejide, have you ever seen God in the labour ward? Women manufacture children and if you can’t you are just a man. Nobody should call you a woman.’ She gripped my wrists and lowered her voice to a whisper. ‘This life is not difficult, Yejide. If you cannot have children, allow my son to have some with Funmi. See, we are not asking you to stand up from your place in his life, we are just saying you should shift so that someone else can sit down.’
‘I am not stopping him, Moomi,’ I said. ‘I have accepted her. She even spends the weekends in our house now.’
She held her thick waist and laughed. ‘I am a woman too. Do you think I was born last night? Tell me, why has Akin never touched Funmi? He has been married to her for over two months. Tell me why he has not removed her wrapper once. Tell me, Yejide.’
I stifled a smile. ‘It is not my business what Akin does with his wife.’
Moomi lifted my blouse and laid a wrinkled palm on my stomach.
‘Flat as the side of a wall,’ she said. ‘You have had my son between your legs for two more months and still your stomach is flat. Close your thighs to him, I beg you. We all know how he feels about you. If you don’t chase him away, he won’t touch Funmi. If you don’t, he will die childless. I beg you, don’t spoil my life. He is my first son, Yejide. I beg you in the name of God.’
I closed my eyes, but tears still forced their way past my eyelids.
Moomi sighed. ‘I have been good to you, I beg you in the name of God. Yejide, have mercy on me. Have mercy on me.’
She held me then, pulled me into her arms and muttered words of comfort. Her embrace held no warmth. Her words sat in my stomach, cold and hard where a baby should have been.
6
Fear gripped my ankles as I climbed the Mountain of Jaw-Dropping Miracles. The heavily bearded man who trailed me did not ease my worries. He was my escort, sent from the mountaintop where the other faithful chanted words that the wind carried to us and carried away again. I could see about a hundred of them, clad in green robes and matching chef caps.
‘No stopping,’ my escort said.
He must have noticed that my steps were slowing. The steep mountain was bare, with no trees to offer momentary shade from the sun. I was thirsty, my throat was dry and
