When Flesh Summons

1.

Korie’s stomach grumbled as he made his way through the plantation of tall green stalks that held ripe corn cobs, their golden tassels swaying gently in the wind.  The thick lance-shaped leaves brushed against his skin as he made his way to his house. The muscles on his leg stung from the long climb up the hill. The sun threatened to melt the corporeality that covered him, and the pebbles were white burning coals. Korie massaged his grumbling stomach. He was certain that this was not the hunger for food. But for something else, he had returned to his village, which sat on the hill’s summit. During his lifetime, his kinsmen had termed him Onye nri. The sobriquet branded his personality so much that he became synonymous with food. Some even teased that the food packed in his protruding belly could be enough for all the children in the village. Once, he returned from his farm, and his wife hadn’t prepared his food. Korie had sat in front of his hut, sobbing and lamenting to the thin air that his wife wanted to kill him. His wife pacified him by preparing a quick meal of three tubers of yam, boiled and sauced with utazi leaves, which he wolfed down and asked for more. 

By the time he left the bushy corn plantation, the yearning in his stomach had tripled. He fought hard to ignore it for a while and focused on inhaling the atmosphere of the village he had departed five months ago. There was a saying among his people that the departed will one day return. A part of him wanted his wife's comforting embrace and mouthwatering delicacies, but he could not return until he was awakened. When, after three months, no one had come to call him up as he had seen people do when he was alive, he dismissed the idea of returning. 

He was sitting with his father when his wife appeared on a fox-shaped whirlwind at the threshold of his new world, beckoning him to return and avenge his death. “Please, my husband, come home and inflict those who betrayed you with sorrow. It hurts me that you’re here and they’re alive and well. I find it difficult to eat knowing you died painfully. Come and take your revenge.” She paused and then whispered, the wind barely carrying the sweet words. “Besides, my body misses you.”

“I miss you, too, nwunye m. But there’s plenty of rest here. There's also peace and plenty of food here,” he murmured, and after a while, added reluctantly, “You're still so beautiful...maybe, maybe you can go and find another man.” 

His father nudged him into acquiescence. “Listen to your wife, son. Do it for her and your sons. Justice in the world can only come from us. So, go home.”  

Now that he was here, it occurred to him how much he missed his wife and two sons. As he walked on, his brain became mature ugba pods, exploding with memories that, like him, resurrected. He recalled the days when the sun’s wrath was intense, and his wife would hold broad cocoyam leaves over his sweltering back, while he bent over tilling the earth. Once home, while his wife set about preparing lunch, his sons would clean the hoes and machetes with short sticks while he praised them. “Sons of their father! Strength of their father! Pride of their father!”

“And what is my portion as their mother?” his wife snapped one day and Korie simply laughed. 

After eating, they would lie on the bare earth, their backs against the sands, and Korie would tell stories of his childhood and how his father had wanted him to be a wrestler. “But farming called me. The earth lured me into its arms,” he had said. 

“Papa, do you eat too much because you plant enough crops?” his first son had once asked. 

“Ask your mother,” Korie had said, laughing, and tugging his wife playfully on her shoulders. Recollections of these intimate moments with his family tore him apart. He regretted now the evenings he would leave them to dine with his kinsmen over gourds of palm wine and roast bush meat. The same kinsmen ripped his family into shreds. 

Until he got to his house, he only met a child of about nine hastening to the stream with a stick. The child looked in his direction, and Korie cringed a bit. This was supposed to be a cryptic return. He relaxed after the child walked past him without giving the impression that he had been noticed. 

Korie’s compound was dead cold. Two round huts faced each other. He slept in one with his wife while his sons shared the other. He crossed over to the isekwu, which was standing a good distance behind his hut. There was no smoke rising from it, and he wondered pitifully if his wife ate well at all. He stared at the blackened walls and the cold ashes that carpeted the ground. It smelled of abandonment.

“Who’s at home?” he bellowed, a sad lump forming in his throat. He looked around the compound. At that point, even he could feel the vacuum his absence created. He wondered how his wife had coped here alone, with their sons living with relatives.  

“Who is here?” he asked again, lengthening his vocals. A head peeped out of his hut. It was his wife. She stepped out, rubbed her eyebrows, and stared at him, her face putting on a smile she had not known for months. She wore the beautiful blouse he bought for her the day he travelled to the market at Onuweke. She tightened her wrapper and rubbed her eyes again. 

“Nwunye m, it is me. I have come home,” he said, spreading out his arms for a hug. 

“Di m!!!” his wife shrieked. She ran toward him and collapsed into his embrace.

2. 

Before its actual occurrence eight years later, the story first came from Pa Nnolim, the white-bearded griot who sat on a bamboo rocker in front of his hut under every moonlight. Children would gather around him to listen to fables about the tortoise’s exploits, the lion’s bravery, or the fictional masquerade that tormented a certain village at night, kidnapping children to convert them into baby masquerades. This was usually after their evening meal. Some picked their teeth with their tongues, making tsk-tsk sounds as they settled down. 

Pa Nnolim was also known to spend time communing with the sky and its elements. He was venerated not just for his adeptness at crafting riveting tales, but for his ability to extract detailed paranormal information from inanimate realms. When the villagers pestered him to accept the staff of divination, he refused outright. According to him, “People make that error of beholding men like me as a god. I do not want to be caught in such mistakes.”

Pa Nnolim, however, subtly crafted some of these unearthly details in his tales. Soon, many somehow realised that there were some germane points in the stories he told. Every day, at the onset of moonlight, parents would dress their children and eagerly send them off to his house. They would then await the children to hear what story Pa Nnolim had narrated and what it held for them. 

At twilight, the children gathered in front of his hut to sit around his feet. In their last meeting, Pa Nnolim had intimated that he would narrate a very important story the next time. So, as they strode into his compound chattering excitedly amongst themselves, Pa Nnolim’s heart overflowed with gladness. Each child carried a level of enthusiasm that proclaimed how ready they were to hear this particular story. 

“My children!” he managed to herald with his croaky voice. “You all look beautiful this evening. Look, even the moon is smiling happily at your splendour,” he said, pointing to the sky. 

The children followed his lead and soon, little hands waved excitedly at the round silver moon that glided softly within the clouds. Pa Nnolim called out to his maid, Nkolika, who brought a raffia mat and spread it on the ground for the children to sit. They waited for him to clear his throat by drinking warm water, which Nkolika fetched in a tubular gourd. Then he stroked his white beard and stared at the children one after the other. He knew them by name, and the villagers considered that impressive for a man of ninety-two years. “How are your parents?” he asked. 

“Fine!!!” the children chanted in unison. 

“Good. Tonight, I will tell you a story that will happen soon,” he started, adjusting his lean frame on the rocker to face them properly. “It will happen because the sky that sees everything told me about it.”

“Papa, is it a good or bad thing that will happen?” Obialor, who was the most vocal in the clique, asked. His only sibling and younger brother, Udoka, who sat beside him on the mat, was his exact opposite; reticent in all his appearance. 

“Good and bad mean different things to different people. So, wait until I narrate the story to know if it is good or bad,” Pa Nnolim said and bent sideways to drop the brown gourd beside his chair. 

“A long time ago, a certain man lived with his wife and two sons in a small village called Ishimmiri situated on a hill–”

“That’s the name of our village, Papa!” Obialor interposed, grinning from ear to ear like one who had cracked a complex puzzle. 

“Yes. It can also be the name of another village. Allow me to continue my story, you boy!”

Pa Nnolim grunted as he resumed. “Now, this man eats too much. Every time you see him, his mouth is always chewing something. One day, the men of the village threw a big feast to celebrate their bountiful harvest and give thanks to their deity for filling up their barns. While they ate and rejoiced, the glutton complained that the meat was not enough. The men had killed four goats and three hens for the celebration. Yet, the glutton lamented its insufficiency and proclaimed that he could finish two whole goats alone. The other men were taken aback by his assertion. 

“Two whole goats?” one of the men exclaimed. They knew he ate a lot but never imagined he could be so brazen about it. 

“Yes! Two whole goats! That’s nothing. I can do three if you all want,” the glutton accentuated, beating his chest in smug pride. 

“He is just blabbing,” another dismissed and gulped the remaining palm wine in his cup. 

“Kill two goats for me. If I don’t finish them, then do whatever you want with me. And when I say two goats, I mean fat goats. Not those sickly ones,” the glutton insisted. 

The men took the dare seriously. They conversed among themselves and assigned some young men to slaughter the goats. Before evening, the meat had been prepared by some of the women under strict supervision. Two whole goats had to be two whole goats, including the innards. The women served the meat in two large calabashes, followed by a procession of curious villagers. The calabashes were set before the glutton, who sat and smiled at his wife and sons. 

He set to work, tearing the flesh from bones and sucking marrow with gusto, an indication of focus on his mission. The villagers watched intently, waiting to see when the glutton would give up. But the latter ate until he finished the first calabash, provoking loud shrieks from the crowd. 

“Chukwu o!!” an aged woman screamed, clutching her drooping breasts in shock. The glutton’s wife smiled, urging her husband on. 

Except for the uncrushable bones that remained, the glutton emptied the two bowls of goat meat. The younger villagers began to run around in circles, screaming and shouting in frenzied astonishment. The men grabbed the glutton and held him down to the stool. 

“Aru!!” one of them, Nsofor, screamed from his heart’s depth, heaving his bulky shoulders in fretful disappointment. “He finished two whole goats! This is abnormal!”

The glutton was now visibly shaken. He hadn’t intended to commit an abomination. He only wanted to prove a point. “Ogini? Why am I being held down like a thief?” he asked his fellow men. They ignored him and tightened their grips on his shoulders so he could not move. 

“I only asked to eat two goats. How is that an abomination?” the glutton asked, his face contorted in apprehension. 

“Our people say that a man who eats more than his brother will one day eat his brother. Such a man can never be satisfied,” another, Nnadi, said, his speech corroborated by the assenting murmurs from the crowd. “If this man can eat two goats, then he can eat one of us one day!”

“Yes!!” the crowd bellowed, stamping their feet hard on the earth in concurrence. 

“We cannot have this man in our midst!” someone screamed from the crowd. 

“Take him far away where we won’t see him or be eaten by him one day!”

The men pulled the glutton up and dragged him away from the scene. The villagers followed behind, the older ones shaking their heads and snapping their fingers in disapproval, while the younger children chanted, “Onye nri! Onye nri!”

They dragged him towards the river down the hill. This river traversed five villages and terminated at Onuweke, the biggest village of all five that shared the tributary, known for its rich commercial atmosphere and undying culture. Some Portuguese merchants usually came to Onuweke to trade with the yam, cassava, and palm oil farmers in the village. At Ishimmiri, the river's starting point, the merchants built wooden awnings along the riverbank to rest their bodies, tanning their white skins under the excruciating heat of the village. They arrived at Ishimmiri on boats loaded with goods bound for Onuweke, which they would exchange for kegs of pure red palm oil, fresh palm wine, and yam tubers at the big market. As a result of this robust trade, they were almost always present at the banks, overseeing the unloading of their boats by young boys who were paid a stipend. 

When the men got to the edge of the hill from where they would begin to descend slowly to the banks, they turned and asked everyone else to return home. The villagers stared at them pryingly, hesitating to obey.

“Go back. We will put him on a boat and exile him!” Nsofor said.

Most of the villagers, except the glutton’s wife and sons, turned and headed back to the village. “Where are you taking him to?” his wife asked, yelling loudly. “Where are you taking my husband to?”

Her sons cried, too. 

“Go back home, woman. We will find another man to care for you. Your husband is now a threat to the entire village!”

“My brothers, the fact that I ate two goats does not make me a cannibal,” the glutton pleaded, his form had now morphed into servility. 

Nsofor turned to the three men who remained. “Drag this woman and her sons back home!” 

Following this decision was a litany of loud cries and pleas from the glutton’s wife and his sons. “Please have mercy on him! Please don’t hurt him! Don’t exile him! I can’t live without my husband!” his wife roared, kicking the ground in grand fury. 

“Papa! Papa!” the boys snivelled, trying to free themselves from the grip of the men who towed them, grazing their knees against the small rocks that covered the earth around them. Minutes later, they were out of sight, and their cries became faint and distant. Nsofor and Nnadi gave each other conspiratorial nods and dragged the glutton down the hill. 

Pa Nnolim coughed loudly and clutched his chest in pain. He called out to his maid to get him warm water. The children sat transfixed on the ground, their eyes shooting inquisitive looks at Pa Nnolim. 

“I am tired. You all should go back to your parents. I’ll complete the story tomorrow when you come,” Pa Nnolim said, dismissing them with a feeble wave of his bony hand mottled with conspicuous veins. The next day, the loud cries of Nkolika alerted everyone to Pa Nnolim’s death. But the story of the glutton did not die with him. 

3.

True to the Nne-Eti’s testament, Ireti sat under an ukwa tree now, breathing hard, after being chased frantically by a sizable snake. Ireti had just crossed the river, the water of which was nearly black due to a long-time accumulation of debris and mud. Many water snakes abode in the shallow part of the river, slithering against each other and sometimes coiling around the water plants that floated on the river. Just when she was becoming thankful to her chi for seeing her through, she heard swish sounds from behind her. She turned and saw the fat serpent lurching through the water plants toward her. She broke into a frenzied race, throwing herself into the mouth of the thick forest. She ran with all her might, and turned into a narrow path by her left, wishing that the snake was not fast enough to note her change of direction. She kept running even when she no longer heard the aggressive rustling of the serpent against the dried leaves that covered the hot earth. 

When she was sure she was no longer being chased, she slumped under an ukwa tree, panting hard. She looked around her to be sure the snake was not anywhere in sight. Slowly, she got up from the ground after she had caught her breath and headed further into the forest, using her hands to clear off the intertwined branches that blocked her path. As she marched on, she plucked some of the wild red fruits the trees offered her, with their branches reaching out like a handshake. The roasted yam she packed for the journey had finished even before she crossed the river.  

Nne-Eti was right about many things except for the distance. “You will be there in two days,” she had confidently said. But Ireti was nearing the third day, yet she was still trapped in this forest. It seemed as though the more she hastened her steps, the more the stretch of towering trees lengthened before her. When she got to a small clearing, she was so fatigued that she fell flat on the ground, decomposing leaves clinging to her body. She stared at the space opposite her, letting her gaze run between fat trunks, creeping plants, and the expanse of greenery ahead of her. 

She woke up an hour later to the piercing and frightening stare of an old man towering above her. He was dark, with prominent wrinkles shrinking his face like a squeezed cloth. His hair, long lashes, and goatee all shone white, casting him into a black and white glow. He held a long stick in one hand and a brown bag in the other. His bloodshot eyes seemed sunken and distant in their sockets. He bent forward to meet her shivering body and sniffed around her. 

“Pa Nnolim! You’re supposed to be dead!” Ireti screamed as she sprang up and backed away from him. Her outburst was cut short when she realised there was no forest around her. It was just powdery brown earth and great swirls of winds making swoosh sounds.

“I am,” Pa Nnolim said, a thin smile appearing on his face. He edged close to her and reached for her hands, an attempt to assure her that she was in no danger. 

“Where am I?” Ireti asked. 

“Relax, Ireti. The forest you met was just a gateway to this place,” Pa Nnolim said, rubbing her shoulders soothingly. 

“Is this the land of–”

“Yes, it is, Ireti. And I know why you have come.”

“Pa, that story you told the children has come to pass exactly as you narrated. When Obialor and Udoka returned and told me the story all those months ago, I didn’t know it would be about my husband.” Ireti broke down in tears.

“Shhhh, woman. You don’t cry here. Do you want to awaken the spirits?” Pa Nnolim hushed her into silence. 

“Pa, I am hurt. I am heartbroken. Who would have thought that my husband’s kinsmen would betray him? Korie didn't deserve to die like a thief.” 

“I must commend you for coming here in the first place. This shows how much you love your husband. You are a brave woman.”

“Pa, I want to see Korie. I want him to come home–”

“I already told you that I know why you are here. And I understand why you want your husband to come home and kill his murderers. But you must know this, Ireti. The spirits that are kept here remain trapped. When they are released, it is very difficult to send them back. Now, I ask, are you sure you want Korie to come back?”

“Pa Nnolim, nothing will give me joy right now than seeing my husband’s killers punished severely for their sins. Yes, I want Korie home.”

“Head in that direction, you will see a white clay pot. Turn to the right of the pot. Korie is there with many others who were killed unjustly,” Pa Nnolim directed, pointing in the distance ahead of her. 

“What about you, Pa. Where do you stay, here?”

“I am one of the watchmen. We ward off infiltrations from the outside world and scrutinise all summons made from the flesh. I allowed you in because I know how desperately you want Korie back home. Now, go before it gets late here.”

Ireti walked with measured steps, glancing back at Pa Nnolim at intervals. He was transfixed and stared piercingly at her. As she walked, there was at once a mighty rush of wind that knocked her to the ground. She turned back, but Pa Nnolim was no longer in sight. Then a wind shaped like a fox appeared before her. 

“Get on it now!” It was Pa Nnolim’s voice echoing loudly around her. Quickly, she got on it. The fox turned around in the intended direction and flew. 

4. 

Before he climbed up the hill to his village, Korie sat on the bare ground under one of the wooden awnings. He slapped hard against an insect sucking on his flesh and cursed. In the other awnings, some distance away from his, two Portuguese men lolled on bamboo chairs, sucking in the sun rays. Where were these men on that day? He wondered. 

He turned back to the spot where it had all happened. Tears of fury streamed down his face. Rage boiled inside him, and his throat thirsted for blood. Even the groaning in his stomach indicated his yearning for revenge.

 “Nnadi and Nsofor will pay dearly for sniffing life out of me,” Korie swore to himself. “They have no idea that whom the gods have not killed has not been killed completely.” 

He stood up from the ground and walked to the spot where they had dragged him that day. Some creeping plants had formed a carpet over the ground. He uprooted them and cleared the area. He placed his hand on the ground and felt the coldness rush through his system, reinforcing the piling rage inside him. It was here that Nsofor produced a small dagger from his jumper and stabbed him several times. Even his pleas, his bloodied mouth, his tears, and the small pieces of undigested goat meat that he threw up did not move them.

“Onye nri! You ate two whole goats! Today, you will eat death!” Nsofor had said. 

“And your farmlands will be taken from you. Your wife and sons will perish!” Nnadi added, smiling callously. 

A day after this act, Nne-Eti, who had discovered Korie’s corpse, came to confide in his wife that he had been killed rather than sent into exile as they had proclaimed.  Ireti quickly sent her sons to live with her brothers at Onuweke. Korie wondered what would have happened to them if she hadn’t made that decision. Maybe, they would have dragged them to this execution ground and killed them, too. Korie stood up, brushed his body, and began ascending the hill to his village for his revenge.