EPISODE TWO

The dusk had risen in a great darkness and umu uburu was folded in silence pierced only by the snorting of frogs and the mimicry of insects that ambushed the shrubs surrounding the huts in the village. The bodies of men had stretched on their bamboo beds in their huts waiting to be awoken by the arms of the chores awaiting their awakening; expect Umukafor who was keeping watch with his worry. He had made himself a personal dungeon in his OBI with the chain of anger bounding him to his fears.

“I just want to be left alone” he had said to Ugonkwo yesterday as he stormed into his compound from a maze of gum trees that was planted into a fence round his compound. That was the only word he had uttered to anyone since he returned from the palace. Ugonkwo who sat under the ukwa tree that morning, outside the obi picking palm fruits sprayed before her, only stared at him and did not make a sound as he disappeared into his hut. To her, Umukafor was just the red embers of coal; he got cold when he burnt himself out.

“A man can save a fellow who is drowning and another save yet another who is dying of thirst but who can deliver a man from the bars of his thought especially when that thought is a foil of certainty?” he said as he slid down the door of his Obi against which, he had been resting, settling finally to the mud floor smeared with cow dung to make it smooth.

He had been awake all through the night and seemed to be engrossed in his thought now, which ran from one dreaded picture to another. The news of yesterday seemed to hang on the air over him as if it’s beginning to unfold. Suddenly, his thought was taken over by a distant cry that sounded like a distressed call. Umukafor listened but could not make out the content of the voice; for it was a spoken cry that seemed to say series of things in haste; a sort of lamentations he could barely piece together to gain understand.

Like a flash, his attention was picked up by the faint sound of Ogene, ‘gong’ that was succeeded by the voice of the town crier. The sound of the gong and the voice of the crier seemed to fall in from the distance as one could barely hear let alone understand what the message was about. Umukafor could not decipher the contents, he knew something terrible had befallen whom, he was yet to discover as he began to walk to his bamboo window to get the glimpse of the message.

“The Ogene that rose up as soon as the cry rented the air could not be anything other than a living nightmare” he thought as he awaited th e crier to get closer so he could gain the message.

“gom gom gom! Umu Uburu genu nti o!, ‘people of umu uburu listen o!’” the crier stopped as he passed his message, delivering his lines with a poise dotted by a conscious pause at intervals as if to gather his words.

“This land is bleeding with sacrilege! Alu! Taboo has befalling the people of Umu Uburu as abominable children are brought to this great land of peace...” he paused and picked up his lines again

“...and this filthiness shall be cleansed by nightfall tomorrow...As our tradition demands, no man, woman or child is to be seen in Onwuegbu , ‘A rolling stream that surrounded Ofia Ajo Mmuo’ until Umu Uburu is delivered of this evil. Onuru kara nwa ne ya o!” he hits the gong again as he moved on, passing the same message and continued until he faded into the distance.

While Umukafor returned to his bamboo bed after the voice of the crier had melted into the distance, he pondered over the crier’s sermon which was a peg of other sacred events that had hung on his mind throughout the night and to which he had no explanations but had been part of them as they sprang up. He seemed to be hunted by the pictures of the great sons of Umu Uburu who had bled season after season to the shrine of Mmani deity.

As if he would make a seat out of the edge of his bed, he sprang up again as he remembered Onuma who despite six wives was childless for twenty three seasons before his last wife, uzoma, became heavy with a child. Nine moons later, she came forth with two male children only to have them taken away and dumped into Afia Aju Mmuo. Two days after his twins were cast into the evil forest, Onuma drowned himself in Onuegbu.

“..And now, another woman prepares to trot the same eye-bleeding pathway...” he suddenly said as if he had been speaking and not thinking. “...that leaves its travellers walking corpses for the rest of...” he eased and froze as he regained consciousness. And then said;

“Until the goat learns how to stick his neck off the tether, he keeps bleeding to the knives of his butchers” his thought seemed returned.

Although Umukafor detested some aspects of Umu uburu culture, his hands had seemed tied by the strings of tradition and the servile spirit of obedience. But not anymore! For a man of a single eye must learn to fetch his fire woods away from a thorn vested forest lest he go blind. His mind rolled back to Ezeoha.

As he repainted the events surrounding Ezeoha’s young life, he seemed to be captured by the aftermath of losing him. The fact that he had lost his only brother, his sole relative apart from his in-laws, to a strange death in the forest of Ugwuele in Uturu where he had gone for a group hunt some seasons ago; The fact that he had grown up in the arms of neighbours after the walls fell in and killed their parents at night of a heavy rainfall; and the fact that he had no child to take his sceptre of existence into the chamber of posterity when he had joined his ancestors, so set their weights on him that he finally took a seat off the edge of his bed.

“Man is a messenger of the gods and in his arms is a sceptre of existence he must deliver to the future before he returns. Ezeoha is my other part that go into the future when I am gone and on his carriage of life, I have placed that sceptre of existence and shall protect him, though I perish by the gods” he cleared his throat as he sprang up, pacing the floor.

“But the gods are wise for they do not send a man an errand with a pot full of salt and at the same time, accompany him with a rainfall...no! I think I sense some hands of monkey in this...I must make my inquiries” he thought indecisively as he paused, staring into the darkness that seemed to envelop his Obi.