What It Means When a Man Falls from the Sky(4)

Something pooled in my fist and it itched, then intensified to a stabbing pain I couldn’t shake off. I punched the lying girl’s nose.

Damaris was the first deserter. She led away the bleeding, shell-shocked girl, sneering over her shoulder. Others followed with rolled eyes and whispered insults. By the end of the day, I was a queen with no pawns.

—

My mother was livid. This time, there were no half-serious threats to tell my father, no jesting declarations of what incorrigible traits I’d inherited from his line. She spanked me, an undertaking she hadn’t performed in years. It was awkward, like running backward.

During dinner, which I wasn’t permitted to share with my parents, I sat on a stool in the kitchen, soothing the shrapnel sting on my behind with daydreams of how upset my real parents would be when they discovered these temporary guardians had used me ill. I tried very hard not to think about the little girl and her nose, how it crackled beneath my fist. I tried hard not to think of Emmanuel, how he’d been discovered by the sister with whom he still lived, hanging from the ceiling fan in his bedroom. When I first heard the news, before the full weight of it hit me, I’d wondered out loud if his legs were still kicking, like the chickens whose necks my mother wrung like sodden towels. My mother had given me a strange look. I tried not to think about that.

In the days after Emmanuel’s death, my father slipped deeper and deeper into the strangeness that had plagued him his entire life. His growing moroseness, his sudden outbursts of anger or mirth, the deep silences he fell into, so heavy my mother would pry and pry till they fell off. When the chance came for my father to transfer to the Port Harcourt branch of the oil company, my parents had taken it, hoping the distance would help.

This time, my father didn’t ask me why I’d done what I’d done, which was just as well. He laid out the chessboard and we began to play. Every once in a while my mother walked by the door, shoes clipping her anger on the tiles. My father glanced up each time, but I ignored her. He was distracted enough that I was able to maneuver his queen into a precarious position.

He paused, leaned back, and rested his head in cradled hands. The stance was familiar. I knew I was about to hear another of his true war stories.

“We were stationed near a small village around Enugu where the only thing worth seeing was the concrete highway that passed through. During the day it was hot enough to char skin, but at night it cooled. That’s when the snakes came out. Dozens of them. They curled on the concrete, which held the sun’s warmth late into the night.”

He raised and caressed his queen. When my mother again walked by, he was too preoccupied to notice.

“While the snakes slept, Emmanuel would tiptoe to one, slip his rifle through the top of the coil, and shoot off its head. The body flicked around for a couple of minutes, then settled down. Then Emmanuel would bring the snake into our tent to cook it. And the smell, the smell just turned my stomach. He laughed at how queasy I got, but I chose to sleep outside instead of fighting about it.”

“I can’t imagine that Lieutenant Ezejiaku was too happy with him.” I had grown fond of the lieutenant, who I imagined was like a father to my father.

“He didn’t really mind until one time when Emmanuel crossed the line. We were walking one evening and there, coiled on the sidewalk, was the biggest snake I had ever seen. I mean, it was bigger around than both of my legs joined together. Emmanuel crept up to it like he always did and fired at the head. The snake went wild. It snapped and flipped so hard, it went off the road and into the bush. Its whipping around even destroyed one of the shacks nearby. Every time it stilled and Emmanuel approached it, the snake sensed him and started flipping around again.

“The next morning, the lieutenant came to our tent and pulled Emmanuel out by his ear. He pointed to a line of villagers who stood not far off. He said, ‘They want you. You have been killing their gods and they want me to give you to them for judgment.’”

My father went silent. He took my bishop.

“I had never seen Emmanuel so quiet. He said only one thing: ‘Please.’ Lieutenant Ezejiaku told him that if one more snake died, he would hand Emmanuel over to the villagers and turn a blind eye to what they did with him. Over the course of the day, a crowd gathered where the snake lay. No one ventured close enough to touch it. Finally, one shirtless boy ran up to it with a stick. His mother screamed at him to get back. He ignored her, the way boys ignore mothers, and poked at the creature. Before we could blink, the snake coiled so tight around the boy, his chest grew purple. He tried to slide the animal off, as one would a pair of too-tight trousers. He was dead in seconds. It took four days before the snake died and they could bury the boy’s body.”

There was something in my father’s eyes, in his voice, as though he hadn’t meant to tell this much of the story, as though, perhaps, he had forgotten that this was how it had ended.

“So what happened to the lieutenant?” I asked, wanting another story to erase this one.

“He died, Nwando; they all died.”

“How come you didn’t die?”

“Because,” he said, “when the time came, I ran.”

My father dragged at his beer bottle, then focused on the chessboard. The next move was obvious, my queen exposed to his knight and rook. But he didn’t move, and I could see that the veil had come over him. My mother, who’d stopped by the doorway to listen, came and gathered me to her. She herded me into my bedroom and sat me down on my bed. I slid under the covers fully dressed. She stroked my head and began to tell me a story of her own, about when she’d been a girl and her cousin found a nest of termites in a tree trunk and the pulp was so syrupy they stirred it like soup. I listened with every atom and she animated the story with everything she had.