To Kill A Brother

By James-Ibe Chinaza

The rain persisted throughout the night to the morning, soaking Ifediba like Dunlop through his sieve-like ceiling. The rust of the zinc had inter-fused with the rain, irritating his nose; there were a number of things he would have loved to have up his nostrils, and none of them consisted of rust. Sneezes burst through his nostrils as often as his mother bellowed, “Holy ghost fire!” Ifediba’s sneeze was identical to his dead father’s—like the starting wail of Mpa Remigius’s old Peugeot. Everything in the sky was grieving, and if the sun did not rise early enough for him to dry out his sodden mattress, the neighbors would come looking for a corpse in his room. Raising his mattress, he retrieved a cracked car mirror, also retrieving his turgid penis from his checkered boxers. He caressed his little selves, complacent by the friction his fresh pubic hair caused. 

“Make I see who go tell me no now,” Ifediba muttered, the smile of an overfed pigeon spread across his face. After tucking his little selves back into his boxers, he stood up from the bed, walked over to the window, and picked up the transmuted toothpaste tube, leaning like a tired man on the wooden bar. He dug his forefinger inside the tube, pushed it around for two seconds, and it emerged with a thin slice of toothpaste. He rubbed his forefinger over his teeth and tongue in brushing motions, and when he was satisfied, he bent over the window and spat the mixture of toothpaste and saliva outside. On the dry mound of earth outside his window, there were white patches of this same solution that the rains could no longer wash away. 

Ifediba rinsed his mouth with water from a plastic jug by his bedside. He could not tell if his mother had dropped it there to collect the rain or if he had left some clean water there himself. Detty no dey kill aproka. 

It was a big day, and every boy in Abajah knew this. The Orimmuo initiation ceremony would be held that morning; one could feel the anticipation tugging at the thick ghostliness that enveloped the town. The crickets chirped louder, and no child would wet their bed because their brothers were to become men. Orimmuo would choose only boys with enough pubic hair to be called mature. Like Ifediba, other boys were inspecting their private parts with hope in their eyes. Becoming a man was the genesis of every boy’s life.

Because it was a great good day when his mother called him, her mouth trembling with terror, and told him of a revelation she had just had in which the spirit of death was chasing him, he did not feel for her temperature. Instead, he nodded his head in that absent-minded manner of his that said, “I go still do wetin I wan do,” and did not forget to rub her heaving back as she bathed him in her sweat and olive oil. 

Ifediba’s mind leaped before him like bushmeat, and he daydreamed of the Nwangele River, where his soon-to-be brethren awaited him with their naked buttocks. 

When his mother was done raving, he sauntered out of the house and into his still-water village. His legs were taking him to the Nwangele River, which felt to him like the start of his story. The presence of this river was a force that enveloped the entire village. It was the explanation for why the skies would cry and cry and cry as though they were mourning their own death. Its existence alone was god, and god is a magnet. Because of this, everything spiritually, good or bad, was taken to the Nwangele River. There was never a moment when the river spoke or demanded worship. In fact, it was just a river to everyone else. But to the people of Abajah, its silence only meant that it had seen everything and knew every beginning and every end. Chị̀ mazụrụ ihe n'ile. Ọgbara nkịtị okwụ́ jụrụ n'ọnụ ya. 

Beneath the crazed sun, his body like a torch, Ifediba moved like liquid. There were not enough words for him to describe the Nwangele River to anyone who might have asked. “Sacred” would have been a perfect fit if he knew how to hold foreignness on his tongue. Perhaps people with little or no words knew best how to acknowledge a deity—with their bodies. 

Ifediba kicked off his mother’s old pair of Zara slippers and took off his shirt. He arched his back the same way his father did years ago. Orimmuo, tupu ụwa tụwa n'ile. 

At the Nwangele River, there were nude figures standing on the river bank in a big circle, with Kenechukwu, their leader, in the middle. Scattered sparsely around the circle were boys with little or no pubic hair, the stench of rejection on their bare bodies like sea salt. They eyed Ifediba when he took off his shorts. Kenechukwu walked up to him and smiled, his hands outstretched, a caricature of the crucifix, his little selves dangling as he swayed. The boys who were not men enough were sent away, and the circle shrank. Kenechukwu hugged Ifediba, their bare bodies pinned together in sheer euphoria. Welcome, Nwannem. 

Kenechukwu broke off his welcome embrace and brought out a razor that he had placed between his teeth, and with a swift motion, he carved a line into Ifediba’s left palm and gestured to the river. He did so to the others who met the pubic hair requirement. Soon, five young boys were bleeding into the Nwangele River, and it carried their blood away.

"Orimmuo! Unu abialianu?" "ee! Anyị abiala." 

Soon, the five boys were kneeling in the middle of the circle as the others circled them like panthers and gave them slaps that left palm prints on the boy’s backs. Anyone who dared to cry was not fit to eat a spirit. Tuwai! Tuwai! Tuwai! Tuwai! The slaps kept coming again and again. The boys literally swallowed their spirits. They ground their teeth and waited for the slaps to cease. When they did, the others broke into a song as Kenechukwu tore his black bandana that had been discarded on the wet sand into five strips and bandaged the palms of the bleeding boys. 

"Anyị kweta, anyị ga afụ echi!"  

Out of the five boys, only Ifediba knew exactly what he had come for, and he knew how to get it; he had it all planned since the moment he heard of Orimmuo—How to take a life without desecration and to change his life with this single act. His resolve was one that his mother’s countless revelations could not thaw. He had looked up to Kenechukwu since forever, and he loved him in a way that was sacred, the same way one would love someone so much that one could not imagine them being killed by another person. Kenechukwu’s death was scripture. 

Things were liberal between Kenechukwu and Ifediba. They had been brothers before they became brothers. Even if Ifediba had not joined Orimmuo, Orimmuo would always have protected him. Ifediba’s late father was once the leader of the cult, and despite his wife’s attempts to change him for good, He lived and died in the service of the cult. Orimmuo was the sole living vessel of the village, and their rituals and songs enveloped the skies and land of Abajah until every old man stamped his foot and mpkara rhythmically. The old women clicked their tongues and wriggled their waists as they cleaned Ukwa with their feet.

The sun rose early and set in grandeur; the wind whistled and told its tales; Nwangele was still. Everyone was alive and okay with that single fact. Then the government came—brothers slaughtered brothers, and there were fractions within the whole. Udaras rot upon their trees, and squirrels did away with mkpụrụ nkwụ. Widows’ roofs leaked, and no one would fix them because nothing went for nothing anymore. The old became ghosts, and the young wandered about in sheer uselessness or sought a way to leave Abajah. Ifediba’s father tried his best to keep Orimmuo independent from the government because he could smell evil. Before his very eyes, the government seduced his brothers with razor-sharp naira notes in polythene bags, and they drooled like dogs over bones. Nothing was ever the same. Money was the new cult. 

The dead man had been a father to Kenechukwu, bringing him home to his wife’s reluctant porridges and to Ifediba’s eagerness to communicate. He brushed off his wife’s tirades about feeding good-for-nothings and insisted that the two boys spent enough time together.

And as fate would have it, they counted Kenechukwu’s first pubic hairs together. Once they got to twenty, the elated boy ran to find Ifediba’s father, forgetting his shorts on the backyard floor. The man was in the kitchen hut, sniffing his Utaba while his wife arranged firewood. When she saw Kenechukwu and his bare butt, she threw a piece of firewood at him, but Ifediba’s father shielded him with his body just in time. 

Kenechukwu could remember clearly when Ifediba’s father’s wife spat at him, “Anụ́ọ̀fia!” The dead man held him in his arms and said to him, “Nwoke!” When he looked up at him, he was certain that the sun had risen twice in each of his eyes. 

A week later, Ifediba’s father died in an accident. He was knocked into a farm together with the little principles he had fed Orimmuo by a speeding UNP Amaka Sienna and was only found days later when the old woman went to harvest her corn. Since then, Kenechukwu had waited for Ifediba to grow so he could call him “Nwoke!” The highest respect one can give a man is to acknowledge that he is a man.

It was with this same respect and love that Kenechukwu made the biggest mistake of his life. He told Ifediba the location and worth of the weapons the government had provided Orimmuo to facilitate the crashing of the upcoming state elections. Of course, Ifediba knew this already, but at the time he calculated the value, the naira equivalent to a dollar had not risen. Now he was counting big big money, and his chest expanded as the value of the weapons sky-rocketed. 

This was his story. He had to make it. 

That night, the moon shone on Ifediba’s pear-shaped head and Kenechukwu’s upside-down triangle head. Their broad nostrils kissed the cold air, and their almond eyes were silent. They both tied black bandanas to their arms and walked home together as brothers do. In front of Ifediba’s house, Kenechukwu helped him untie the black bandana and tucked it in his pocket. This was to prevent his mother from having a holy convulsion. 

That same night, he thought of the best time to excavate the guns buried beneath a Ukwa tree a few feet away from the Nwangele River. When he had picked a date, he thought of when it was best to kiss his brother for the last time.  

On June 13, 2017, the same day his father died years ago, the sun rose early as Ifediba wished. He took his mattress outside, knowing that was the last time he would ever lie on something that hideous. Like every other good day, he abused his teeth with too little toothpaste and took in his mother’s prayers. As his mother prayed, he thought, Just this step and this woman would never have to pray again.

He shaved his hair with a blade until he was a reverse Nazarene, and then he let himself be pulled to the Nwangele River. There was to be no meeting that day, and all he needed to do was dig up a gun and arm it before he would arrive to check on them. He pulled off his shirt, fastened his black bandana to his left arm, and sang as he dug;

"Anyị kweta, anyị ga afụ echi! Anyị jụ, ọbara g'adi ka osimiri…”

In thirty minutes, Ifediba had struck the first shotgun, and he armed it. He continued to unearth slick guns that were coated in oily skins and arranged them like babies inside a brown leather bag. When he was done, he sat beneath the Ukwa tree and waited. Two hours, three hours, then Ifechukwu came towards him. Bare-chested in the sunlight and smiling in the manner a brother smiles at his brother when he wants to be blind to the gun in his brother’s hands, Ifediba cocked his gun. And he shot Kenechukwu once through the chest. Shooting him more than once would have desecrated his body. 

As Kenechukwu mimicked the setting sun in his dying parade, a single cry left his lips: “Nwoke!” 

Ifediba walked towards his brother, bent over, and kissed him on the lips. He pulled him to the river and let it take him. With the heavy leather bag slung across his frame, Ifediba staggered back to his mother’s home to say goodbye. He also planned to tell her that she would not need any of her altars again because the misery that birthed her faith was about to be pursued. He did not take off his black bandana. 

“Ifediba! What is this you have on your arm? Nwa egbuọm ooo!” His mother screamed, flinging herself to the concrete floor and pulling at her hair. 

"Ifediba, gịnị kam mere gị? Ifediba! Ị know we are poor, but think about the people who have nothing at all.” His mother pleaded with him, a crucifix imprisoned in her palms. 

“Mummy, we better pass some people no mean say we get am good.” Ifediba caressed his mother’s hair and planted a kiss on it. It was the last time he would see a woman this miserable. He walked out and hugged the cold air. He was on his way to Ámá Hausa to sell the guns for big big money. 

Orimmuo found Kenechukwu’s body in the river, water-kissing bullet hole. They searched for Ifediba’s body, too, and they could not find it. They knew what he had done. 

Three days later, Nwangele River was being itself, past, present, and future in one body. Everywhere and anywhere. Omniscient and as quiet as a wish. Ifediba’s mother was pounding fufu in her kitchen hut, her son’s name in every hit. Perhaps this is why no man is a river, because only a woman can be pounding fufu and still be with her son whose sins have driven away from his father’s house. While she was pounding, a boy who had just counted more than twenty pubic hairs walked up to her with trembling hands. He sent more than one bullet through her body. 

"Anyị jụ, ọbara g'adi ka osimiri…"

A week later, while the night fell into its tomb, Ifediba returned to Nwangele and its ghostliness. He snuck into Mpa Remigius’s hut and forced the old man awake,

“How much you go take to bury my mother?” He asked in a whisper. Mpa Remigius did not tell Ifediba that a mother does not belong to one person but a community. He did not tell Ifediba that his mother was theirs too and that they would have her buried with or without him. By default, Mpa Remigius muttered, “Nde Naira.”

Ifediba left him with 1 million naira and stole away into the night. 

Orimmuo spills more blood into the Nwangele River, and it accepts. On his bed, with the kerosene lantern burning low, Mpa Remigius’s grandson is counting his pubic hair. It is the week of elections, and they have buried a new batch of guns beneath the same Ukwa tree. 

Biography

James-Ibe Chinaza is a writer and a human, among a plethora of other things she is unaware of. She is an inebriated fan of sunsets, music, and photography. Poetry is her way of saving herself; prose is her way of becoming. Her stories have appeared or are forthcoming in Arts Lounge, Isele, The Shallowtales Review, the Kalahari Review, Agbowo, Fiery Scribe, Cons-cio, and Brittlepaper.

She was shortlisted for the 2023 Sehvage Literary Prize for Creative Non-Fiction and emerged as second runner-up in the 2023 Ikenga Short Story contest. She currently serves as the prose editor II of The Muse Journal No. 51.

She goes by James-Ibe Chinaza on Facebook and X.