to survive with the only seed, as she called Jamike, which God gave to her. She believed the god of Nnorom would not allow this one seed of his to be taken away. Nnorom, she said, never harmed anybody while he lived, nor did he commit an abomination or anything forbidden by custom or tradition. She could not understand why the god of thunder chose to take him. The divination priest told those who went to the oracle to seek the reason for his death that it was on account of some oath he took but did not fulfill in his previous life before he reincarnated. The Priest said Nnorom would have reincarnated as a stump of a tree but for the intervention of benign fate. If his parents had appeased the god when he was born he would still be living.
To make sure that Jamike would not suffer the same fate as his father, Uridiya sold off many of their farmlands to appease Amadioha. The chief priests of the god carted away most of Nnorom’s property, as is the custom when the god of thunder is responsible for someone’s death.
Most mornings when Uridiya visited her farms there was an unwelcome activity in one or two of them. It might be that a villager who farmed the portion of land adjoining hers had encroached beyond the boundary with one or two tongues of hoe strikes. It might well be unintentional or even intentional just to see if they could get away with a little piece of her farmland. Sometimes youngsters in search of firewood had removed dried palm fronds that covered germinating seeds. If she found out, then it was time to call up the neighborhood to witness the hatred visited on her. Villagers farming in the vicinity would stop work for a moment to listen to what problem the widow had to warrant her yelling. They knew immediately that someone had wronged her.
In the evening when she returned from the farm, there was always something that would cause her voice to be heard beyond the rampart that surrounded their family com pound. It could be that someone had made use of a little bit of her meager pile of firewood or taken water from her clay storage pot, or that someone had left the barn open for goats to eat her little quantity of cocoyam. Each day, at some point, she would scream and curse the machinations of evil people against her. Some days, though, Uridiya would walk along the road silently, saying nothing to people she passed on the way. If Uridiya were greeted while in this mood, she would mutter a response to herself, saying, “How can you greet me when you too are in the plan to have me dead?” She was suspicious of everyone. When she walked along the village dirt road in silence, Uridiya was in her own world.
“What am I going to do so people will leave me alone?” she would reflect. “In fact, if they ever cause my death, they would be the worse for it because I will promptly return as a witch and snatch away all who destroyed me. They cannot run me to death and stay alive here. They must join me in the land of the spirits. But what I cannot do now is to take my own life. If I do, what will I tell this seed that the gods gave to me? Those who caused my death would make sure he died too so they could take over Nnorom’s household.”
Two
Jamike and his mother lived off the products from their farms. Cassava, cocoyam, green bananas, yams, and plantain were their main foods. In a bad harvest, things were difficult for them. Uridiya would sell pepper, vegetables, and a small bowl of palm oil to buy a handful of crushed crayfish to give taste to their soup. Meat in their food was a rarity. If they wanted beef broth to season their soup, Jamike would take a pot of water or a bundle of firewood to the village butcher so he would give him some broth in exchange after he cooked meat for sale. But as a village boy, Jamike would go into the bush some nights with a palm oil lamp or a lit bundle of sticks tied together to pick snails following a heavy rain, or he would pick mushrooms the morning after. On Saturdays during the planting season he accompanied Uridiya to the farm and helped to make mounds for cassava or cocoyam planting.
Other times he would go on insect-hunting excursions in the farms and low bushes in the village. Early in the morning sometimes, when dew had dulled and weakened the insects, Jamike would go into nearby bushes to catch edible insects like grasshoppers, praying mantises, crickets, and beetles for food. After Jamike removed their wings, Uridiya would fry the insects and put them in their soup.
During the season for edible caterpillars, when greenish voracious caterpillars, like locusts, descended on trees and shrubs, a season that came around at long intervals, Jamike would climb trees to shake caterpillars off branches and leaves so that persons on the ground under the trees would pick them. Once he was on the tree, he would climb from branch to branch, shaking some branches with his hand and thumping his foot on others while he held strongly to another branch. When he came down, he would collect a handful of these wormlike caterpillars from each person.
Sometimes a stingy villager would not contribute enough caterpillars to Jamike. Jamike would be upset and would show it. An old woman was once tightfisted with Jamike.
“What is this you are giving me? I would rather not take any caterpillars from you than for you not to give me enough.” He attempted to walk away, refusing the handful the woman offered.
“Go ahead, young man, and collect from others. By the time everybody gives you their share you will have more than enough.”
“Mama, just give me a fair share from what you have. Don’t worry about what other people may give me.”
“Are you ever satisfied, you little boy? Did you do any other thing except to climb a tree? You are not God that put caterpillars on the tree.” People standing around laughed as they watched the old lady and the young boy exchange words.
“I am not God, but I am the one that climbed the tree. If climbing the tree is nothing why didn’t you climb it yourself?” Jamike was firm.
“If I were a man I would climb it.”
“Now you know you are a woman, please give me the caterpillars.”
Another villager in the group who got tired of waiting for Jamike while he argued was getting ready to leave her share for Jamike at the foot of the tree.
“Please don’t do that. The caterpillars will crawl away.” His simmering anger rose to a boil.
“Please give me the caterpillars. If these other people leave without giving me anything I will seize this big bowl that you have,” Jamike warned.
“I did not get all these caterpillars from here. I have been out all morning.” She gave him a little more.
By early afternoon, before the sun got too hot, Jamike would have climbed over ten trees, and his sizeable calabash bowl would be filled with a big mound of caterpillars crawling in a slimy mass over one another, raising and shaking their tiny heads. When cooked and dried in the sun or fried they became delicacies for different types of soup. Sometimes Jamike and his mother would have more than they required, in which case Uridiya would sell some.
During the rainy season, Jamike and the other boys went to the community pond at midnight to catch frogs. They carried lanterns or brightly lit bundles of dried thin sticks that showed the water of the pond under illumination. They would then surround the pond at different points. On noticing the light the frogs would attempt to jump into nearby bushes. As they tried to jump out, they would be apprehended. Each frog caught had its long legs broken so it wouldn’t jump out of the bag.
As he grew older, Jamike began to hunt rabbits and squirrels with other young men in the village. Sometimes he followed older men on their hunt, carrying their hunting bag like an apprentice. After they slaughtered their catch for the day, he would go home with a leg, thigh, or even the head of a small animal. On these occasions, Uridiya would welcome and embrace her young son with a broad smile and shower praises and sweet names on him for bringing home meat for their soup. She would call him Nwachinemere, one who God takes care of, and Nwadede, my beloved. Jamike
