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Our Father’s House

Samuel Ekanem

    The funeral came and went, then the thanksgiving. Two ceremonies in one week - two different wears - a white paper lace and feathery black rope for the funeral, an orange background, yellow ankara for the thanksgiving.
    We jointly accorded Papa a befitting burial. You bought and brought down the casket from wherever, and I penned down his biography and other articles in the funeral magazine, got it published there in the States and fled down the copies. You went out for the seats, the tents, the live band and the dancers, and I stood in with the Mason, to come out with our desired structure for the tomb, the epitaph scribbled to our taste: brief, world-class and evergreen. You sponsored the ambulance and the brass band that sang him back from the cool room, and I paid and went round for the media announcements and other publicities.
    And we grieved together, taking turns to sprinkle red, muddy earth on his casket. And thereafter we lined up and danced into the church for the thanksgiving, took another turns to address the congregation, each of us in a pattern of English: I phonetic, you even more American than the time you’d spent there.
    Are all this a lie, brother?
    Was the money for the funeral all from your pocket?
    Why the sudden business?
    We make handfuls of dollars together there in America; you with a beverage company in Texas, I with a college in California. Our kids all in the universities there in America and their fees not hanging on our necks.
    How would the villagers see us?
    Papa died at 90, a good age. Perhaps he could’ve lived longer if only we’d responded on time. Or did we not explain to our villagers and the church’s laity council and Father Bartholomew why we couldn’t respond on time? That you’re busy with a promotion programme for your company and I in exams for my college? That all we needed was a brief time to tidy up things and come down and fly him back abroad for medicals?
    But we never did and he passed away.
    We got the text from uncle Inem Ikang: Your dad finally slept this afternoon. Pls come home let’s start things.
    Yet we gave him a good funeral, and truly he’ll be happier wherever he is - if we did that for him and still live unblemished lives even in his very absence.
    Inasmuch as I’m here, brother, this house is not for sale.

***

    I said all this and brother Usana said nothing. He sank deeper in the sofa, in the livingroom, looking outside through the window, the window opening and closing from the silent breezes that sauntered in from the balcony. The compound was tensely quiet, as though frozen with Papa’s spirit, birds chirping, flying in and out of a windbreaker in the courtyard. A bird swooped down and dang on the window frame, chirping, its chirps echoing into the room and out through our father’s tomb. We watched the bird with no specific curiosity, as something normal when a compound is over quiet or deserted. The bird chirped a few more times and sped away. Then brother turned his gaze into the room, over my head, perhaps at one of papa’s enlargements. And as if papa’s spirit that must have spelled him, glued his mouth that long, for thinking a bad thing, had now had mercy on him, he said, “What a waste. Snacks waste, beverages waste. And now, a whole bungalow, waste.”
     The snacks? Had to be.
    You don’t feed fowls with grasses no matter how fresh, and can’t graze goats with grains. Why all the foreign snacks and beverages in a village funeral?
     Brother’s house girls carried the snacks from tent to tent, alongside the beverages in small, ceramic saucers and tea cups in plastic trays, the sympathisers shaking their heads slowly and waving them away as though they’re carrying poison.

***

     “Waste?” I said. “Not at all. We rent it out to people, the rent paid to uncle.”
    “Which Uncle?” Brother asked.
    “Inem Ikang.”
    Uncle Inem Ikang was on my tongue, in my saliva, in my head each time I thought of our father’s house. No man could’ve been nicer. At least he’s a brother to Papa not for any grand reason, but the reason that papa was his biological brother. He’s the reason Papa lived his eighties. When Papa fell sick those first times, he took from his pockets and footed the bills. And he never complained, never even told us. By the time we’re engaged in subsequent illnesses, we only stayed abroad and did the phoning and the sending and the skyping. He’s in the middle of things, his wife shutting her Mama Put kitchen to be at the hospital.

***

    Brother bowed his head, staring down at the wine glass that he’d filled with Hollandia yoghurt, on a stool beside him. His head was balder, as if having buried Papa had aged him a little more or as if Papa himself had balded him from the realms, to make him old enough to succeed him. Last he visited me in California, a year ago, the baldness had barely started, from his forehead, the hairs falling off haphazardly as though eaten by cockroaches. I teased him of planning to depot him to Nigeria if he balded more. He laughed and brushed his head with his palms, an unconscious thing that rather looked delibrate, delibrate to doing away the balding. Now, the thing had spread far down across his head, like a red road graded for tarring.

***

    Brother looked at me after a few sips of the Holandia yoghurt, his face gloomier as it was the day we buried Papa, when he undid his sunglasses to see an important person or when he whispered to Father Bartholomew on the altar, or each time he took a celfie with Engr Osborne, one of his company’s representatives at the funeral, as often as they rammed into each other and each time the priests recited a new line at the mass, Engr Osborne’s skin banana-yellow, walking steps fowl-like, cheeks bulging and even sagging.

***

    “We can’t use papa’s house to reward uncle Inem Ikang”, brother said, his voice deeper than ever. “His rewards will be in some way else.”
    “You’re talking, brother”, I said. “Just as we shouldn’t use our father’s house as an award prize, we shouldn’t also use it as a commodity.”
    “Let’s think out of the box, Nna. You’re my only brother and sibling. We need that unison of thought. We need to immortalize Papa.”
     He paused and searched the floor, as though to pick his next statement. “We cash off this house, raise a foundation to immortalize him.”
    Brother picked his glass of Holandia youghurt and relaxed into the sofa. He sipped from the glass but didn’t put it down.
    “That’s the unison”, I said. “We must immortalize Papa. I agree totally. But let’s not mortalize him in the process of immortalising him. The first thing that immortalizes a man is the thing that came directly out of his labour. Brother, the first thing that can immortalize Papa is this house, his own house. This house is Papa and Papa is this house. Or are you not still feeling his presence all over this house, even after all the renovations and rebranding?”
    Brother dropped the glass gently, as if something was maiming his hand. Now, the zinc had started crackling from the hot sun, the noise loud, peppering the silence. He looked around and above at the ceilings, as if searching for papa’s presence. He fixed his gaze at papa’s Formica cupboard beside him, old books piled in its steps. Perhaps he must have remembered when Papa bought the cupboard, a hot afternoon like this years ago, the year that we won the scholarship that schooled us abroad, the year that Papa showed his biggest disbelief ever, that the scholarships weren’t genuine, but was ready to sponsor our flights to America. The year we realized that Papa had so much money, because after finding out that airlines were charging N200,000 for America, he said that he was ready to pay for us both. And after the foundation gave us a free flight to the States, he phoned us now and then: Is it true? Are you both there? And therafter he bought a big goat and tubers of yam and sticks of smoked fish to appreciate the scholarship board.
    The year after which Boko Haram bombed our parish and Mama was one of the mass deaths, and we didn’t come home for her funeral, because we’re writing the most daring exams in Oxford, the year after which we came home for Mama’s memorial service in September, read out our tributes at her grave, kneeling and weeping, Papa standing and watching.

***

    Brother looked back at the glass of hollandia yoghurt on the stool beside him. His face was redder and voider, the quietness in the room hanging heavier. There were light matches in the room in which Papa was buried. Perhaps it was Papa ghosting out of his grave to sit on his velvet couch in the parlour, to chair our talk, the way he used to do when we came home, cutting in in the middle of the talks to say, you both are healthy and fresh, you don’t read too much? They say people who study abroad read too much.

***

    “And what about the foundation?” Brother asked, his lips heavy.
    “We fund it.”
    “What name?
    “Etim Ikang Foundation.”
    “Platform?”
    “Welfare and empowerment.”
     Brother stared at me, then at the floor and then outside.
    “Let’s give it one leg”, he said, looking back at me.
    “As in?”
    “Welfare or empowerment.”
    “Why?”
    “The more legs, the more funds.”
    “Just empowerment, then?”
    “Well, then.”
    “This house as the secretariat, Uncle Inem Ikang the manager.”

***

    This was the last thing I said and the last thing brother nodded to under the roof of our father’s house.

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