KINGSLEY ALUMONA
This morning, after Mass, when everyone had left the church, I sat in the confessional, confessing my sins to myself and to God. “God, forgive me,” I wept, “for my baba’s death.”
I didn’t cause my baba’s death the way Ayo killed his mother for money ritual. Not the way Linda killed her husband with rat poison for abusing her and her children. Not the way Chidi killed his pregnant girlfriend with an overdose of abortion pills.
Definitely not the way Adanna killed her friend with a gun for snatching her fiancé from her. Nor the way Sister Margaret smothered Sister Carol with a pillow for threatening to expose her affair with a priest.
“Baba, what I’m about to tell you is unimaginable,” I had told him. “But, I know you’re strong enough to bear it.”
“Father,” Baba had said, the usual way he addressed me, “you know you can tell me anything.”
Those were the last words he spoke after I told him the secret I had been keeping from him, from everyone, for five years. His last words, as he eyes bulged, as his face contorted, as he clung his chest, and fell on the floor. I struggled to revive him, His mouth eerily twisted as if he was saying something to me.
Outside, the wind was ruffling the leaves of a mango tree that cast a shadow over the statues of Madonna and Child, and birds were chirping on top of the tree. I could hear some men singing and clapping outside — men Baba used to lead in praise and worship, who had volunteered to join in planning his burial.
A gentle footstep, loud enough not to be ignored, startled me. I peeped from the small holes in the confessional and saw a woman approaching the altar. She stopped, looked in the direction of the confessional, even though she couldn’t see who was inside. She continued her way to the altar and knelt before it, her eyes fixed on the Virgin Mary. Maybe Jesus. Maybe Angel Gabriel. I wasn’t sure.
I knew her. Mummy Hope. In her late twenties. Fair in complexion. Slightly chubby with slightly big bosoms. It was difficult not to look at her more than once. Her presence buoyed my soul. When she had her only child, five years ago, Baba brought her and the child to me, and pleaded that I be the child’s godfather.
I didn’t know how long I had been engrossed in these thoughts that I only noticed the woman leaving. The men praying outside were gaining momentum like the sun above them. Perhaps that was where God was, with them. Not in the confessional. Not with me.
My phone rang. I stared at the cross on the chaplet on my neck before retrieving the phone from the pocket of my robe. It was one of my twin siblings.
Baba’s funeral was tomorrow.
…
I was at the Arrival lounge of the Ibadan airport to welcome home my twin siblings, Kenny and Taiwo. Though I was five years older than they were, they now looked bigger and taller.
Kenny’s new features surprised me. It was a bit difficult for me to recognise her. She was now fairer and slimmer, and a bit taller, as if she hadn’t been eating proper food. But I was happy she was radiating life and energy.
Kenny wasn’t happy with me being a priest. The day I was ordained, amid the celebration and prayers, she told me that one day I would force myself out of the many things Baba had forced me to become.
Taiwo now had tattoos running from his elbows to his wrists, and a pierced left earlobe without an earring. His chest and shoulders were bigger, as if they were pumped with artificial air. If I had seen him from afar, I might not have recognised him, especially with the Denzel Washington bounce he had adopted.
On the Sunday of my first official sermon, Taiwo asked me what I would have become if I weren’t a priest. I had never had the will to become anything else. So, I told him that it was the will of God that I was a priest.
One more time, I took a close look at my siblings, struggling to sustain the waning smile on my face. Then, I looked at the two beautiful women with them and smiled more.
Kenny introduced her friend as Lisa.
Lisa. She looked more like a half-caste, with skin like Beyonce, shaped like Tiwa Savage, and as tall as Kenny. Her cologne mesmerised my brain. I inhaled more and shook her soft hands, her long painted nails almost cutting into my flesh.
Taiwo placed a hand on my shoulder and introduced his friend as Aliyah.
I couldn’t place Aliyah well, especially her accent. But she had a slightly pointed nose, a slightly round face, unusually natural long hair, and an ebony skin that glittered like she just applied baby oil. I had to stoop a bit low to shake her small hands, as she rubbed her protruding stomach with her other hand.
We all got inside my car and began our journey home. On the stereo, Angelus was playing.
As I drove, taking in the breeze flooding in through the window, I watched from the rear mirror as my siblings and their friends talked about everything but church and death. Their voices were high, their laughter explosive, as they talked about their lives in the United States and the United Kingdom.
I kept my eyes on the road and my sorrow to myself.
When the conversation became a bit slower, Kenny asked, “How is Aunty Kehinde?”
It immediately dawned on me that we hadn’t talked about our old mama and our baba, whose burial they had returned to attend, ever since we met at the airport.
I turned and smiled at Kenny. “Aunty is fine.”
Aunty Kehinde — Kehinde, as we usually called her — was our mother’s younger and only living sibling. When Baba wanted Taiwo to study law at the University of Lagos, but he ended up studying marketing at Kano, Baba almost disowned him. It was Kehinde who stepped in and paid all the bills throughout his studies in Kano.
It was also our aunt who supported Kenny’s education at the University of Ibadan — where she was a professor of gender studies — when Baba refused because Kenny dropped out of pharmacy, which he wanted her to study, for sociology.
It had been five years since the twins travelled abroad — Taiwo to the United States and now a co-founder of a brokerage firm in New York, and Kehinde to the United Kingdom and now owned a fashion brand in London. Since they both travelled, this was the first time they were returning home.
When I informed Kehinde, over the phone, about Baba’s death, she didn’t scream and curse death for taking his life the way Mama did. She didn’t even ask how he died. She only asked how I felt now that he was dead.
“What do you mean by that?” I had asked, broken.
“I’m sorry. But, with time, you’ll be fine and free,” she had said.
As we approached our family house, my conversation with our aunt kept resounding in my head. Minutes later, as I turned off the car’s engine in front of Baba’s house, where he died, I knew there would be no freedom for me.
…
Today, at Baba’s funeral, with his remains lying inside an open grave, six feet below our feet, I wished I could bring him back.
After the long prayers and tributes, the officiating priest talked about fond memories of Baba that rekindled the tears in our eyes. The priest called him by his nickname, Baba Father, a name he had treasured more than his real name, a name I was sure would warm his heart even in death.
Baba’s greatest regret was not becoming a priest. So, when I was born, during my christening, he had told God to direct my path towards becoming a priest.
“Our dear son, brother, uncle, father, and in-law came from the Lord,” the priest intoned. “And he has gone back to the Lord.”
We chorused amen. But my own amen was faint. I couldn’t even hear myself. It was as if I was looking for myself in the box, as if Baba and I were lying together in his rusted spring bed, as we used to when I was a child, and he would teach me how to recite the Catechism.
“It starts with the Catechism,” he had told me. “A good altar boy must be good with the Catechism. A good altar boy makes a good priest.”
And because I loved him, I was good with the Catechism, I was a good altar boy, and I was a good priest.
Mama was standing beside me, crying, asking why Baba had to leave her in this cold, lonely world. Cold and lonely was exactly how I was feeling, too.
Beside Mama was Aunty Kehinde. Two intriguing women. Three years apart, and looking very alike, but Mama was slightly shorter, darker, and fatter. Aunty Kehinde wasn’t crying. She just crossed her hands behind her back, staring at the box in the grave.
I didn’t know whether Kehinde hated Baba, because she didn’t get along with him. He constantly accused her of poisoning the minds of the twins, indulging them with the Western lifestyle. On several occasions, when I was a teenager, I saw them exchange harsh words to the point they almost fought, if not for the intervention of our neighbours.
“You see what your rude aunt is doing with the twins,” Baba had told me one day when I returned from the seminary. “She’s a very bad influence. Avoid her if you must be a good priest.”
And I avoided her. At least, in his presence.
Baba didn’t know that, while at the seminary, Kehinde visited me once every semester and bought me things he would never buy for me. He didn’t know that she was the reason I survived and fared well at the university. He didn’t know that she was the reason I knew most of the things I knew about women.
The priest was still preaching.
Taiwo was holding hands with Aliyah. They were dressed in black, with black sunglasses over their eyes — the American way of burying their dead, I thought. But we were in our village, where all our lives began, where Baba gradually grew old and decided which child to love and which to hate.
“Don’t mind your brother. He’s a disgrace to us,” Baba had said when he learned Taiwo had travelled abroad. “He ran off to America to live the sinful life he knows I won’t let him live here.”
Taiwo occasionally called from America to enquire about Baba, and sometimes sent some money to him. Kenny never called Baba since she travelled to London. Whenever we spoke on the phone, and I mentioned Baba, she would threaten to end the call.
Kenny and Liza wore white suits. I could tell from Kenny’s face that she couldn’t wait to travel back to London, where her body and soul belonged. If Baba were to resurrect and see her here, he would remind me of what he always said about her.
“She’s just like your crazy aunt. Always seeking attention in the wrong places and people,” he would say. “London can have her. We don’t need her here.”
Hope was the youngest person at the funeral. She was my first godchild, before every woman in the parish wanted me to become their children’s godfather. She was the first child whom I paid her school fees, and still did. When she was a toddler and sick to the point of death, I sat on her sickbed and prayed like I had never prayed before. She taught me what it meant to be a father — not the reverend type of father, the real kind of father.
Mama was staring at Hope and her mother with rheumy eyes. There was something in her face whenever she stared at them. It wasn’t a frown or anger. Occasionally, Kehinde would look at Mama and Mummy Hope, then cast her gaze on the open grave.
Mummy Hope placed a hand on her daughter’s shoulder. The child was almost her carbon copy, asides the shape of the child’s nose and her dark skin. There were tears in Mummy Hope’s eyes. There were tears in our eyes. Except in Hope’s eyes.
Standing a few inches from Baba’s open grave, I tried imagining why I allowed him to love me so much that it seemed he hated my siblings so much, why—
“Dust to dust…” the priest intoned.
We began to throw earth into the grave.
…
Six hours after the funeral, when all the sympathisers, relatives, and friends had gone, we sat in the sitting room waiting for someone to break the silence that engulfed us.
Outside, the evening harmattan wind was tousling the leaves of the old cashew trees in front of our house, whose fruits and nuts my siblings and I sold for pocket money as children.
Mama was still in her mourning dress, staring at Baba’s photographs on the wall. Her eyes were fixed more on their black-and-white wedding photograph. When she took her eyes off the wall, she looked at us — more at the twins — and began to cry.
“What’s it now? Five years?” she asked. “And you two just showed up from nowhere?”
We all kept quiet. Another moment of silence lingered.
“Who are these women?” Mama asked.
After what seemed like forever, Taiwo cleared his throat, scratched his head, said, “Mama, this is my wife, Aliyah. We got married a few days ago.”
Mama scowled at Taiwo and gradually shifted her gaze to the short pregnant woman beside him with a veil around her head.
“How dare you bring a dwarf, a Muslim, into our home?” Mama flared, standing up. “Have you gone mad? This marriage won’t work. Whatever charm you used in holding my son won’t work.”
Aliyah gawked at Mama and stood up. Taiwo held her hand, but she slowly withdrew it and left the room. Taiwo opened his mouth to speak, but words failed him. He just sat there as Mama rained insults and curses on him.
Mama sat down again, panting, fanning herself with her wrapper. From where I was seated, I could see Aliyah pacing and smoking a cigarette.
When Mama faced Lisa and asked who she was, Kenny looked at Aunty Kehinde, then at Liza, then at me, and muttered, “She’s… She’s my lover.”
Mama shifted uneasily in her seat, struggling to breathe. I gaped at Kenny, who was now holding hands with Liza. Kehinde seemed isolated from the drama.
“What did I do to deserve this?” Mama placed her hands on her head and cried with her mouth widely open.
I wanted to walk up to her, to console her, but I didn’t know what to say.
Mama suddenly raised her face from her palms, looked at Baba’s photographs on the wall, then at Kenny, and asked, “How are you going to give me grandchildren?”
Kenny stared at the floor, took a deep breath, and said, more to herself than to us, “I… I’ve not thought of that.”
Mama’s mouth opened, but words didn’t come out. She turned around, staring at no one in particular, as if being remote-controlled.
She suddenly stood up and faced Kehinde. “You caused all this. You spoiled my children. God will punish you for this.”
“I’ve heard that a million times,” Kehinde sighed. “Cursing and blaming, that’s all you do.”
Mama went straight for Kehinde’s neck. “I’ll kill you—”
“I’m married with two children,” I cut in.
“What!” Mama stopped in her tracks. She looked at me, then at Kehinde. “Do you know about this?”
“Truth to God, Kemi,” Kehinde raised her hands in surrender, “I don’t know anything about this one.”
Mama took three feeble steps backwards and collapsed on the floor.
…
We were in the hospital with Mama. Aliyah and Liza weren’t with us. Aunty Kehinde wasn’t with us either.
The day I was ordained a priest, Baba joked that only priests were true children of God while others were children of priests — including him, the father of Father — and I had felt really proud of him and myself that day.
However, one year into the priesthood, I was tired of everyone calling me Father without me being a father. I was tired of being lonely. But because I loved Baba and was afraid of what people would say, I decided to gnash my teeth and bear the pain. On the other hand, I had always known that if I were to bear the pain, I must have someone, a woman, to make it bearable.
So, I fell in love with a woman from my parish. She got pregnant. Abortion wasn’t an option. And we couldn’t have a child out of wedlock. I took her to Lagos, rented a flat for her, and secretly married her in a local court. Months later, she gave birth to a boy. Three years later, she gave birth to a girl.
“Mama, you wanted grandchildren,” I said. “Please, accept mine.”
She shook her head. She said if Baba were alive, he wouldn’t accept such children. She said our church and community wouldn’t accept such children. She said the sins of their father would always follow them.
I kept quiet, staring at the chaplet on my neck. The old ceiling fan in the room was making a loud sound, but no one paid attention to it, except that the cold was beginning to get to me.
A few seconds later, a brisk, familiar footstep caught our attention, and then Kehinde was standing at the door. There was no colour in her face. She slowly walked in and sat beside me.
We all stared at ourselves, not sure how to react or what to say. Mama adjusted herself on the bed as if there was fire underneath it.
Kehinde allowed the silence to register before she said, “I was at Omotola’s house a few minutes ago.”
Mama looked at her sister, at first with a slight shock on her face, then a scowl, as if she would fire bullets from her eyes and kill Kehinde on the spot. She took a deep breath and slowly leaned her back on the metallic edge of the bed.
The twins exchanged glances, then simultaneously looked at Mama, then at Kehinde. When they looked at me, I felt a sudden weight in my heart. I bent down my head, staring at my shoes.
As all eyes focused on Mama, she exhaled heavily like a deflated tube and turned to Kehinde with pleading eyes.
“Why are you doing this?” Mama asked.
Kehinde sat upright, facing Mama. “Omotola said your husband named their child Hope because he thought the child was his only hope since the twins had disappointed him.”
Hope. I almost said the name out loud out of the shock of the revelation. The first day that Baba brought Hope to me to be her godfather, I had held the baby in my hands, feeling her heartbeat, the gentle movements of her legs and hands, and the soft sound from her mouth. She was beautiful. Still was.
All those years, I didn’t notice her nose that looked like mine, that looked like Baba’s. Her skin that was as dark as Baba’s.
Taiwo craned his head towards Kehinde. “What are you talking about?”
“Ask your mother,” Kehinde answered.
“You’re lying,” Mama faced Kehinde. “I don’t want to hear your lies anymore. Yinka was a good person. You’re not.”
“Well, if Yinka were alive, ask him why I left your home after the twins were born,” Kehinde fired back. “He was crushing on me, always staring at my breasts and buttocks. He wanted to rape me on two different occasions. So, don’t sit there thinking he was a saint. He wasn’t.”
“Lair!” Mama screamed.
“Really?” Kehinde screamed, even louder. “One more thing. Omotola told me that Yinka forced himself on her, that she almost aborted the baby. Yes. That’s your husband for you.”
Mama suddenly kept quiet, as if a bucket of ice water had been poured on her. I took a deep breath and swallowed saliva. Taiwo muttered something I didn’t understand.
“Ah,” Kenny exhaled, stretching herself in the seat. “I wish I hadn’t returned.”
Hope. How could such a nice name, such an innocent girl, embody such a history? I had preached hope and love for years. I had seen that girl and her mother go through life. I had heard Baba many times tell me that all children were my children, that I should see Hope and her mother as family. That—
“Kemi,” Kehinde cleared her throat, interrupting my thoughts. “It’s good this is happening. For reconciliation. For healing.”
Healing… My heart was shimmering with things I couldn’t name. I was drowning.
Mama was scowling at Kehinde, heaping curses on her, telling her how a disgrace she was to our family, how she was a bad woman, how she would rot in hell, and that she didn’t want to see her again.
“Kemi, you may be a good person. Perfect even,” Kehinde said, heading for the door. “But we’re all God’s children.”
There was an uneasy silence when Kehinde left the room. Mama was now lying on her back, staring at the ceiling, crying.
“Mama, we’re sorry,” I managed to say.
“Just go. All of you,” Mama barked, without looking at us. “Just leave me alone.”
…
When we stepped out of the hospital, we saw Aunty Kehinde leaning on her car. She entered the car when she saw us, started the engine, and beckoned us to get in. At first, there was an awkward silence as we drove home. The only sound wa
