God's Children Are Little Broken Things by Arinze Ifeakandu

Author:Arinze Ifeakandu
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: A Public Space

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Two years after they graduated from secondary school, after Ralu entered his second year in Nnamdi Azikiwe University and Makuo didn’t even gain admission, Makuo started going to Weather Head with Crazy Man, who was about ten years his senior. He returned to Aminu Road one evening, Ralu was told, high like there was no tomorrow, found his father beating Obum, and punched him. Nobody liked the way the man beat his children, they told Ralu. After all, he and his wife weren’t the only evangelists in Sabon Gari and others didn’t beat their children like that. But nobody supported Makuo for fighting his father, for standing in the doorway after letting Obum run off and saying, “If you ever touch am again, I swear, you go regret my next action.” Nobody liked that he turned on his mother and said, “And you, too, if you didn’t want us, why did you bring us into this world?” After his real death at twenty-three, people began to say he had died on the day he’d punched his father and insulted his mother.

Obum had once shown Ralu the ladle with which his parents beat him, brown, smooth, sturdy wood, the same ladle with which his mother turned garri. “If I don’t teach you,” Makuo’s mother would say, “then I don’t love you.” By the time they entered secondary school, Makuo had learned and mastered ways of manufacturing other experiences he’d had with his parents—they had gone to the zoo on Christmas Day, they had gone to the amusement park on his birthday—each experience lacking, at first, in specificity, and then becoming outlandish. One day, in JSS3, he came to school with a camera phone. “My father bought it for me,” he said, his classmates clustering around his table, touching the phone, taking pictures. The next day, the principal called him out on assembly ground. There was a song the students sang to taunt people who had stolen. That day, they sang it to Makuo, clapping their hands, stomping their feet. “Mai thief! Mai thief!” they chanted.

That night, someone knocked loudly on Ralu’s door. It was late, the compound had gone to sleep, and the sound of Baba Tosin’s snoring could be heard from next door, a constant fixture of night. Ralu’s father came into the living room, where Ralu slept on the sofa. “Who’s there?” he barked, his machete clasped firmly in his hands, as though wielding it against darkness itself.

Makuo simply wept.

Ralu’s father opened the door. In the room, Makuo continued to cry, head bowed. It was shame, Ralu would realize years later after the knife fight that killed him, to be seen that way, helpless, always helpless, it made Makuo ashamed. Obum stumbled into the room, holding his brother’s hand. In the soft moonlight that cut the room conically, he looked lost. Ralu’s mother rushed to them, ushering them in.

Long after Obum had slept off, on a blanket spread for him on the living room floor, Ralu and Makuo stayed awake, watching WrestleMania.

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