from the old one. The older churches taught of a God who was responsible for everything, both good and bad. Believers were encouraged to accept their fate with good cheer, trusting the God who would deliver if He chose to. The God of the New Church was a good God, but he was only good, and He was good all the time. He took credit for everything pleasant and the blame for evil was shared between the devil and his cohort of doubting Christians. Evil of any kind, from an injured toe to lung cancer, happened only to the unbelieving or those with feeble faith.
This was the way the New Church handled our heartbreak. First, they christened it the work of the devil, asking us to pray harder than ever—expecting the Holy Spirit to bring Pastor Samuel back. Later, we were denounced as agents of Satan, concocting a scandal to bring disgrace to the church.
In my heart, I knew it was just a temporary trial. Like Job, we were being tested of God. I gave myself to prayer and reading the Bible. I encouraged my brothers and sister as they wept themselves sore. God had not forgotten us. He would deliver us in His own time.
That Friday night, after we got the “last and final warning” from Fountain Mortgage Bank’s lawyer posted on the front door, Mother woke me up in the middle of the night and asked me to help with tidying the boys’ room. She gave me two hundred naira right then, so I asked her no questions, I put the money in my pillowcase and followed her to their room. We stood in front of the blue chest of drawers at the foot of the bed, saying nothing as we rolled up Andrew’s socks one into the other and tied Peter’s in knots. It was a little glimpse of the type of mother she once was, the type of mother who was careful to do the little things you asked from her. She folded Andrew’s underwear into tiny squares, and Peter’s she rolled into short scrolls.
We folded T-shirts, singlets, and trousers, and then we hung up all their church clothes in the wardrobe. My brothers slept soundly next to each other on a queen-size bed beneath a white mosquito net suspended with twine from nails in the ceiling. There was a ceiling fan that no longer worked. The windows of the room were wide open, letting in a misty draft. Peter coughed but didn’t wake up, Mother looked like she wanted to go to him, but then she turned around and asked me to shut the windows.
I woke up late the next morning. It was nine thirty, and I was really angry with myself for accepting Mother’s bribe and ruining my sleep. I had woken up late and missed the first part of Cadbury’s breakfast television. It was a once-a-week, two-hour program on the Lagos state-owned television channel showing premium American television. They had, in the month before, begun showing Family Matters and A Different World. Cadbury’s breakfast television was the only interesting thing available to watch on Saturday—the rest of the day’s television stations devoted themselves to live soccer matches and replays.
I loved Carl Winslow. He was the perfect father. He even looked like a father was supposed to look: balding, round-faced, and old. For a few necessary minutes every Saturday, I would watch Family Matters and pretend he was mine. But on this Saturday, the television was turned off. Father sat quietly in his armchair, his Dake Annotated Reference Bible between his thighs. There was no one else in the sitting room. Bibike was still asleep and the boys were sitting on the kitchen floor, whispering. The note, a sheet torn off a reporter’s notebook and placed slightly underneath the television, said:
My dear children,
I have gone to New York.
There is nothing left here for me anymore.
Peter, i f God blesses me, I will send for you.
Love,
Your mother.
In the end, our mother was just the first to leave. My family unraveled rapidly, in messy loose knots, hastening away from one another, shamefaced and lonesome, injured solitary animals in a happy world.
ANDREW
2000
WE ARE BUILDING a chicken coop.
My brother, Peter, and I came up with this plan just last weekend. Already we have started working it out. We have no hens yet, but we know that Nonso’s mother’s hen always has eggs. When Nonso is over here trying his best to make our sister Ariyike smile, we will walk into their compound all majestic and what, go all the way to the poultry at the back, take as many eggs as we want, hope they hatch.
We have wood, gravel, and leftover roofing sheets from the time the local government built a shed with a roof for the transformers down the road because electricity shocks killed some boy’s father during the last flood.
We have old wood, nails, and sawdust, and we will find old plastic bowls no one uses anymore.
All of Grandmother’s things are old. She still has those green Pyrex dishes, teacups, saucers. They are older than all of us grandchildren. She still wears the aso oke wrappers she wore when Sister Kehinde and Sister Taiwo were baptized. We will not use any of Grandmother’s things. She has given us the space at the back of the house for the chicken coop, and that’s just enough.
We do not need a hammer. That’s what stones are for.
We are digging the hole already. It’s ankle deep and is wide enough for us to stand back-to-back in it. Already we have a heap of sand-dirt. Grandmother says that chicken coops do not need a foundation. We both insist that they do. So we promise that we will spread the sand-dirt all over the back of the yard instead of leaving an unsightly heap.
We do not have a phone. We are thinking of ways to get one.
We are alone at home. Grandmother is out shopping. Our sisters are at work. We are big boys, eleven and nine, old enough to be by ourselves staying out of trouble.
We have walked all over the carpenters’ shed in the next street, picking as many old wood nails as we can find. We are sitting at the back of the house, straightening bent nails with a big stone. Sometimes we think we hear the gates opening, someone coming, but there is no one else here.
The boys next door are playing table soccer in their backyard. We cannot hear the sound of bottle caps falling off the table or large suit buttons pushed into a goalpost made of paper. It is their happiness we can hear, the sounds of boys our age cheering and screaming. It sounds like it is coming from a galaxy far away.
Last Saturday, we walked for fifty minutes till we got to Rita Lori Hotel in Ikeja. There was a wedding reception. We had two black shopping bags. We were going to pick up as many bottle caps as we could find, start our own league. I was going to take all the Coca-Cola covers; all the Fanta and Sprite covers were to be Peter’s. If we got more than enough to split evenly this way, we were going to scratch the covers till the names disappeared and write our player numbers with red ink.
There was no guard at the gate, so we walked in. We searched for covers but there were none. We were too late; the hall had been cleaned up. We went outside to the dumpster behind the hotel. The guard was there smoking cigarettes. He offered them to us. I refused, and he chased us away.
When our hens are grown, they will lay eggs of their own. Then we will sell them for money. We will buy a crate of soda, and drink as often as we like. We will have our own teams and players.
