Just before nightfall, with his mother dressed in her best, they had all three, at her urgent request, gone to his father’s grave, taking a secret route and avoiding the main village. It was a small cemetery, not more than twenty years or so old, started when the Rural Health Department had insisted that no more burials were to take place in the back yard of households. Bola took a bottle of wine and a glass and four split halves of kola, each a half sphere, two red and two white. They reached the graveside and she poured some wine into the glass. Then she spoke to her dead husband softly and caressingly. She had brought his son to see him, she said. This son whom God had given success, to the confusion and discomfiture of their enemies. Here he was, a man with a pensionable clerk’s job and not a poor farmer, a fisherman, or a simple mechanic. All the years of their married life, people had said she was a witch because her children had died young. But this boy of theirs had shown that she was a good woman. Let her husband answer her now, to show that he was listening. She threw the four kola nuts up into the air and they fell onto the grave. Three fell with the flat face upward and one with its flat face downward. She picked them up again and conversed with him once more and threw the kola nuts up again. But still there was an odd one or sometimes two.
7
They did not fall with all four faces up, or with all four faces down, to show that he was listening and was pleased. She spoke endearingly, she cajoled, she spoke severely. But all to no avail. She then asked Meji to perform. He crouched by the graveside and whispered. Then he threw the kola nuts and they rolled a little, Bola following them eagerly with her sharp old eyes. They all ended up face downward. Meji emptied the glass of wine on the grave and then said that he felt nearer his father at that moment than he had ever done before in his life.
It was sundown, and they all three went back silently home in the short twilight. That night, going outside the house toward her son’s window, she had found, to her sick disappointment, that he had been throwing all the cooked food away out there. She did not mention this when she went to say good night, but she did sniff and say that there was a smell of decay in the room. Meji said that he thought there was a dead rat up in the rafters, and he would clear it away after she had gone to bed.
8
That night it rained heavily, and sheet lightning turned the darkness into brief silver daylight for one or two seconds at a time. Then the darkness again and the rain. Bola woke soon after midnight and thought she could hear knocking. She went to Meji’s room to ask him to open the door, but he wasn’t there. She thought he had gone out for a while and had been locked out by mistake. She opened the door quickly, holding an oil lamp upward. He stood on the veranda, curiously unwet, and refused to come in.
“I have to go away,” he said hoarsely, coughing.
“Do come in,” she said.
“No,” he said, “I have to go, but I wanted to thank you for giving me a chance.”
“What nonsense is this?” she said. “Come in out of the rain.”
“I did not think I should leave without thanking you.”
9
The rain fell hard, the door creaked, and the wind whistled.
“Life is sweet, Mother dear, goodbye, and thank you.”
He turned around and started running.
There was a sudden diffuse flash of silent lightning, and she saw that the yard was empty. She went back heavily and fell into a restless sleep. Before she slept, she said to herself that she must see Mr. Addai next morning, Sunday, or better still, Monday, and tell him about all this, in case Meji was in trouble. She hoped Meji would not be annoyed. He was such a good son.
But it was Mr. Addai who came instead, on Sunday afternoon, quiet and grave, and met Bola sitting on an old stool in the veranda, dressing Asi’s hair in tight, thin plaits.
Mr. Addai sat down and, looking away, he said, “The Lord giveth and the Lord taketh away.” Soon half the village was sitting around the veranda and in the yard.
10
“But I tell you, he was here on Friday and left Sunday morning,” Bola said. “He couldn’t have died on Friday.”
Bola had just recovered from a fainting fit after being told of her son’s death in town. His wife, Asi’s mother, had come with the news, bringing some of his property. She said Meji had died instantly at noon on Friday and had been buried on Saturday at sundown. They would have brought him to Kumansenu for burial. He had always wished that. But they could not do so in time, as bodies did not last more than a day in the hot season, and there were no trucks available for hire.
“He was here, he was here,” Bola said, rubbing her forehead and weeping.
Asi sat by quietly. Mr. Addai said comfortingly, “Hush, hush, he couldn’t have been, because no one in the village saw him.”
“He said we were to tell no one,” Bola said.
The crowd smiled above Bola’s head and shook their heads. “Poor woman,” someone said, “she is beside herself with grief.”
11
“He died on Friday,” Mrs. Meji repeated, crying. “He was in the office and he pulled up the window to look out and call the messenger. Then the sash broke. The window fell, broke his neck, and the sharp edge almost cut his head off; they say he died at once.”
“My papa had a scarf around his neck,” Asi shouted suddenly.
“Hush,” said the crowd.
Mrs. Meji dipped her hand into her bosom and produced a small gold locket and put it around Asi’s neck, to quiet her.
“Your papa had this made last week for your Christmas present. You may as well have it now.”
Asi played with it and pulled it this way and that.
“Be careful, child,” Mr. Addai said, “it is your father’s last gift.”
“I was trying to remember how he showed me yesterday to open it,” Asi said.
12
“You have never seen it before,” Mrs. Meji said sharply, trembling with fear mingled with anger.
She took the locket and tried to open it.
“Let me have it,” said the village goldsmith, and he tried whispering magic words of incantation. Then he said, defeated, “It must be poor-quality gold; it has rusted. I need tools to open it.”
“I remember now,” Asi said in the flat, complacent voice of childhood.
The crowd gathered around quietly, and the setting sun glinted on the soft red African gold of the dangling trinket. The goldsmith handed the locket over to Asi and asked in a loud whisper, “How did he open it?”
“Like so,” Asi said and pressed a secret catch. It flew open and she spelled out gravely the word inside, “A-S-I.”
The silence continued.
“His neck, poor boy,” Bola said a little wildly. “That is why he could not eat the lovely meals I cooked for him.”
13
Mr. Addai announced a service of intercession after vespers that evening. The crowd began to leave quietly.
Musa, the magician, was one of the last to leave. He was now very old and bent. In times of grave calamity, it was known that even Mr. Addai did not raise objection to his being consulted.
He bent over further and whispered in Bola’s ear, “You should have had his bones broken and mangled thirty-one years ago when he went for the sixth time, and then he would not have come back to mock you all these years by pretending to be alive. I told you so. But you women are naughty and stubborn.”
Bola stood up, her black face held high, her eyes terrible with maternal rage and pride.
“I am glad I did not,” she said, “and that is why he came back specially to thank me before he went for good.”
She clutched Asi to her. “I am glad I gave him the opportunity to come back, for life is sweet. I do not expect you to understand why I did so. After all, you are only a man.”