Читать книгу Black Sunday - Tola Rotimi Abraham - Страница 11

HOW TO BUILD A CHICKEN COOP

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.

Peter is unhappy with this work. He is focused on the nail in front of him, squinting like the sun is in his eyes even though we are in the shade of the cashew tree, straightening nails as he is supposed to, bottom first then the top, over and over. There is an interesting melody in this repeated banging, easy to get swept up in, gbam gbam gbam, shake your head, gbam gbam gbam, from side to side.

He is sitting with his legs crossed under him like he is in a mosque about to pray.

“Andrew? Are you hungry?” he asks. Looking up at me.

He is just like Mother, staring and squinting like that. I do not mention that. Instead I say, “Let us go and search for something to eat.”

We leave our pile of nails there and go looking for our friend. His name is Solomon, but everyone calls him If You See My Mama. He is a good dancer. He dances all the time. Anytime there’s loud music. Especially when there’s a ready audience, like people gathered at the beer parlor or at Rosetta’s snooker joint. People sometimes give him money. Most give him food.

I can do what he does, dance galala like Daddy Showkey, but I have no plans to dance for food. To dance for food, you have to be able both to dance and to eat anything. I don’t like stew without pepper. I cannot stand vegetable soup with crayfish in it. Peter can’t eat eggs or beans.

Solomon lives with his mother in the house where the TV repairman Uncle George lives. There is a pile of broken televisions on the veranda outside their house. There is a big one with a brown wood-paneled back, the TV like a long rectangle lying on its side. Sometimes, the littler kids sit in it and pretend to be newscasters reading the evening news.

I am Frank Olize

And I am Abike Dabiri

This is NTA Newsline

Today there is no one sitting inside the TV. We go into the house and find Solomon’s mother’s room. It is the third on the left. The one with a charismatic renewal sticker on the door.

It says HONORING MARY, NEVER WORSHIPPING. I have no idea what it means.

Solomon is inside. He opens the door only when he hears my voice.

“Andy dudu.” He calls me by the nickname I hate. His room smells like freshly cooked egusi soup, so I let it go.

“If You See My Mama,” I sing out loud.

“Tell am say I dey for Lagos,” he replies.

“I no get trouble.” Peter supplies this last part. Solomon and I laugh at him because he still makes r sound like w.

“Sit down,” Solomon says as he laughs. “I wan turn garri. You go chop?”

“What type of soup do you have?” I ask.

“Egusi,” he says.

“Nice,” Peter says.

Peter and I sit on the floor. There is a curtain with little blue fish and yellow bubbles demarcating the bed from the rest of the room. Solomon kneels by the bed and pulls out a tiny stove and an old Mobil tin gallon out from under it. He opens the door and places the stove and keg outside. As he pours kerosene into the stove, I tell him what we are up to.

“We are building a chicken coop.”

“Since when?” he asks.

“A few days now,” I reply.

“For sell or for choppin?”

“Both,” I say.

“For selling,” Peter says.

Solomon comes back into the room, picking up a kettle and a box of matches. There is a covered plastic drum at the foot of the bed. He opens it, puts a cup in it, and fills the kettle with water.

“This is the perfect time for chicken business,” he says to us. “It will be almost Christmas by the time the chickens are big, then you can sell them for even more money because of Christmas rush.”

We did not think it would take that long to raise chickens.

“Let me tell you where you can get maize for free.” Solomon puts the kettle to boil and comes to sit on a stool next to us.

“What for?” Peter asks.

“Where?” I ask at the same time.

“For feeding your chickens na.” He looks at Peter like a fly is on his nose. He turns to me and asks, “You know where the bakery is?”

“Not really.” This time I am not ashamed of not knowing. Solomon has lived here since he was five years old. Father brought us here this year to live with his mother, our grandmother. We do not know where our father lives now.

“It is bit far. I don’t know how to describe it. There is the borehole with three huge water tanks right next to it,” Solomon says.

“Our sisters will know,” Peter says.

“Every morning when my mother goes to buy bread for sale from the bakery,” Solomon continues, “there’s always fresh maize in a calabash. She says people leave it there as offerings to spirits.”

We will take maize offered to spirits for our hens.

When Solomon is done, he brings the food in two bowls, one for garri, the other for soup. He sets it right in the middle of the room. Peter and I sit next to each other, Solomon sits on the opposite side facing us. I have a feeling that I have been here before. That all this has happened already, and I am just now remembering it.

“You better don’t touch my meat,” Solomon says to Peter.

“Sorry. It was a mistake,” Peter says, and the feeling is now stronger than it has ever been. I force myself to eat but I can no longer do it. I am searching inside my brain to know what I remember, what happens after this. There’s nothing. My mouth is bitter, my stomach feels like I drank cement mix.

Solomon says something to me, but I don’t hear it. Peter laughs and replies.

“—he say he wan free money.”

They finish the food, but we do not get up. We are talking in this room, a multipurpose room where I can see everything Solomon’s mother has got—plates, pots, and pans poking out of old moving boxes, a pile of old clothes in a brown leather box with a broken handle. There is a black-and-white TV with a wire antenna on top of it.

We are sitting on a scratchy faded green rug with spots of candle wax all over it.

We are talking about new music. We all agree not to like musicians who start their choruses with names of girls. (“Sade” by Remedies is a stupid song; “Omode Meta n Sere” is the greatest song of all time.) I am thinking about Mother and Father. Mother hates worldly music. Father hates it but smiles anytime our sister Bibike sings.

As we sit here talking, a short man I do not know walks in. He does not knock, he just pushes the door open like that.

“Welcome,” Solomon says to him as he motions for us to get up, leave.

“Sit down and continue your enjoyment.” The man speaks to us, smiling a wide white smile that brightens his face. His lips look too wide for such a small face. The man has dark blotched skin. His face is a perfect round shape. His eyes are swollen and red. He looks like Raphael the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle without the green. The man sits on the bed behind us and starts taking off his clothes. Solomon springs up.

“We are leaving. My friends have to be home before their grandma comes back.”

“They don’t have to leave. Okay. Take this money. Let the small one stay. The two of you go and buy something to eat—” The man is still talking. I get up. I pull Peter onto his feet. The man is still smiling, softer now, hopeful even. He is sweaty even though he has taken off everything but his undershorts. I do not know what he sees in my face but he stops smiling immediately. His transformation is instant, almost funny.

“Get out of here, foolish children. Shut the door,” he screams. “And Solomon, you better not come back till your mother comes home this night.”

We rush down the hallway, to the veranda of TVs and into the streets. Peter is humming. We are walking slower now, still saying nothing. Peter stops in front of a dusty Datsun that looks like it’s been there for ten years and starts to write on the windscreen, “Wash me please.”

We walk in silence until we get to our home. The boys next door are still playing a game. We can also hear some girls singing.

“Let’s go see Stanley.” Solomon does not wait for me to respond. He walks to their house, opening the gate.

Peter and I look at each other, then we go in with him. Their house looks just like ours—cracked plaster walls, a moldy well to the left at the entrance, a veranda made with red brick paving stones.

At the back of the house, the boys are playing table soccer in one corner. Stanley is winning. Their table is huge. They have taped a linoleum rug over the wooden top. The bottle covers just glide over it. Peter and I will never be able to make a table like that on our own. I must become friends with Stanley.

A group of girls are in dance formation. They have strips of aso oke tied across their chests. Longer ones cover their waists down to their knees. Girls are magic beings. They have to be not to die from itching, wearing scratchy aso oke next to their bare skin like that. They are singing in Yoruba:

We are here

We are here again

The eagle is the king of birds

The lion is the king of forest animals

We are greater than these by far

We are singers, dancers too

I am watching them but pretending not to do so. Soon they start to argue. One girl, the shortest, the one with blue stars drawn on her legs, wants the group to roar like a lion at the end of the first verse. Many disagree with her. As she talks, explaining her point, she keeps untying and retying her waist wrapper. It is a very womanly move and it makes me feel like my stomach is punching itself. It also makes me think of Mother. Mother once made us crowns out of her old gold aso oke. Peter and I hated it. We wanted store-bought crowns, like the other kids in the play.

As I watch the girls dance, I start to feel the feeling again. This time it is a different, more sure feeling. I am certain all of this has happened before. I have seen this before—little girls singing, dancing, smiling, one in the middle stopping occasionally to stare at me, saying nothing, just smiling. I feel like all I need to do is focus my brain and I will remember what I am remembering.

I notice a lizard running across the yard, it runs over my feet and then goes up the wall separating our house and Stanley’s. Once it gets to the middle of the wall it stops, still except for bobbing its little red head every few seconds. I have seen this before. Even this red-orange lizard crawling over the wall, nodding.

The girl looks at me again. This time I smile back. I blow a kiss. She spreads out five fingers, points them at me. “Your mother,” she screams.

Girls are crazy.

There is a concrete slab in the center of this backyard. It is a long rectangle that extends almost to the end of the east wall. It’s as if someone intended to cover the ground completely but ran out of concrete too early. The girls are dancing on one side of the slab. On the other, Stanley’s mother has spread out yellow maize and red guinea corn to dry on a raffia mat.

Some white pigeons circle around above. The girls love birds, they wave at them singing the leke leke song, Leke leke, give me white fingers, won’t you?

Sometimes the birds swoop down as fast as lightning. They pick bread crumbs or a smooth pebble or chicken feed. A couple of pigeons hover close to our heads then fly away. They want the maize, but they won’t land because we are here. There are too many of us.

One of the boys notices the pigeons and says something. The rest of them stop playing to look at the birds. Then someone says, “I have an idea. Let’s make a bird trap.” Another says, “I know how to build one.” They begin to argue about what is needed when Peter invites them to our house.

“We live next door. We have extra wood and nails. We are building a chicken coop,” he says.

They want to see what we are up to. They want pieces of wood to make a trap. And so we walk away, a small crowd of boys in two lines. If the girls notice us leaving, they don’t show it.

As we walk into our house, I see it the way they see it. Our moldy well has a pile of broken plastic buckets next to it. Our laundry is drying on the walls of the perimeter.

Solomon laughs when we get to the hole we have dug.

“Just look at this.” He is laughing. It is the second time he has spoken since we left his house.

“You don’t need this big hole, don’t you know?” a skinny tall boy says to me. He is wearing a white shirt. His dreadlocks are long and dusty. “You just need four small holes for your four-by-twos, then you pour in a little concrete and it stays.”

“We were going to fill the hole with stones,” Peter says.

He sounds like he is annoyed and impatient. He must be unhappy with me. This is our house, I should not just stand there like a fool while these boys laugh at us.

“Which is easier? Stones or concrete? Where will we get concrete from?” Peter continues. It is hard for him to say concrete, so he is making everything worse.

“Okay. Do you want to help with the bird trap, then, or are you still digging your nonsense hole?”

“Just shut up. With your scanty hair like an abandoned mop.”

Now everyone is laughing at tall-skinny-dreadlock guy. Peter just walks away, into the house. Not even glorying in delivering the perfect insult.

A gentle wind stirs in the cashew tree in the middle of our yard. It is becoming evening, the warm humidity is being replaced by the cool breeze. When the boys stop laughing to begin sorting through nails and wood pieces, I continue standing where I am, watching the wind make the leaves dance. I notice a lizard, I think it is the same one that was in Stanley’s yard, dash up the tree.

The boys have gathered wood pieces of different sizes. Some the length of a walking stick, others short as a pencil. Skinny-dreadlock guy sits under the cashew tree and gathers all the materials to himself. He starts to arrange them in a pyramid-like pile. When he figures out the arrangement of sticks that makes up a perfect pile he splits them up in pairs, giving one pair to each boy.

“Take. Look for stone. Knack these two together,” he says.

Peter comes out of the house but doesn’t speak to me. He walks right to skinny-dreadlock guy and sits next to him. I do not know what he says to him, but he looks like he is apologizing.

When Peter was younger, he was so slim (even slimmer than dreadlock guy), his head was huge, his legs were super short. I called him Mr. Big Head Small Body because he looked like those cartoons in the Sunday paper. He hated it, but I couldn’t stop. The more he protested, the more I enjoyed teasing him. One day, Father showed him a picture of a lion in a calendar and said: “That’s who you are, son, a lion. A son of a lion is a lion.”

A son of a foolish man who loses all his money to fraudsters is what? A son of a poor man whose wife leaves him is what? A son of a man who runs away, leaving his children with his mother, is what?

Father should see Peter now. He is no longer tiny. He is tall, almost as tall as I am. His head is bigger and harder. No one can tell him nothing.

I watch the two of them talking. Then skinny-dreadlock guy picks up three sticks, he sets them in position, he makes a shape like a small letter t. He starts to nail them together. Peter reaches out to steady the longer piece underneath. The nail goes through both pieces of wood and into the thin skin between Peter’s thumb and his forefinger.

“Oh my God.”

“Sorry. Sorry. I’m so sorry.”

We are all scrambling. The nail, the t-shaped sticks, are stuck in Peter’s hand, like they are sprouting. We surround him. We hold him down and pull it out. There wasn’t blood before. Now there is a lot of it. There is a lot of blood. Someone wipes it with his shirt. Another grabs a fistful of sand, pours it over the wound. The blood stops rushing out. Someone tells Peter to shake his hand. As he shakes it sand and blood fall to the ground at his feet.

I see the lizard fall off the tree, race over to be next to Peter, lap droplets of blood as they fall to the ground. I look in its eyes and see myself the way it sees me. I am dark and dusty like a school blackboard, my head is bigger than the rest of my body, my hands are tiny, plastered to my side. The lizard stops to look at me. He is nodding again and again. I think the lizard is laughing at me. I am sure of it.