Uchenna Awoke
Age: 54. Residence: Iowa City. Book: The Liquid Eye of a Moon (Catapult, June 2024), a folkloric coming-of-age novel that details the journey of an adolescent boy who travels from his village in rural Nigeria hoping to take charge of his own destiny despite the limitations imposed on him and his family by a contemporary caste system. Agent: Annie DeWitt. Editor: Kendall Storey.
Twenty-two
Eke and I get hired after he returns from the village with stories of Christmas and how my family has missed me and wish I had come home, too. My mother even wrapped spices and asked him to bring them to me. She now carries a new Bible, Eke says, that’s as big as my tin box. Eke met my father sitting under the umbrella tree when he went to our house. My father wanted to know if I had sent him something for his snuff and ekpetechi. Eke ended up oiling his palm to make him stop groaning. My father laughed, blowing air from his nose, and Eke was sprayed umber. I cherish hearing stories of the village from Eke: my siblings whining about how they have missed me, Machebe’s curiosity to know the real reason I did not return like everyone does at Christmas and how Eke lied that the white men had requested me to do a special job for them, and Madam Bridget’s bar swarming with drunks who went wild when Eke showed up like a rainbow in their sky.
Eke and I are hired along with two other labourers to fill in the foundations of two new, large buildings in early January. What a lucky break! Eke figures it will take slightly over a hundred and fifty buckets of the tipper truck to complete the work, and about one week and a half to finish the contract if we manage to do sixteen trips a day. We are going to be paid a lot of money for this job, and Okike’s tomb is long overdue on account of the setbacks I suffered. If all goes well, I will be visiting home after we finish the contract to take care of the tomb and see my family I have missed so much. I don’t tell Eke about the woman we buried, though. I don’t want him blaming me for accepting the wrong kind of job even though it helped me to recover financially after the attack from the madman.
“She had been an outcast for many years,” Mama Obodo had said after hearing the story. “She became one after she killed a god reincarnated in a tortoise, or so they say.”
“I don’t understand,” I said.
“You are foreigners, that’s why you were hired to bury her, as any indigene of that community who gets involved in her burial would be cast off, too. Her children would have been contaminated if she’d had any. They would belong to the god now.”
On the first day of the contract, Jerome, Nduka, Eke, and I manage to do fifteen trips, working from dawn to dusk. As usual, we spend the evening at Mama Obodo’s, to release our aching joints for tomorrow’s work. The next day we are back digging and hauling, smoking and chattering. We take turns to dig, to deepen the soft base of the quarry, leaving a peak hanging dangerously above us. A large powder keg sitting next to a fire.
I am in the pit digging for our ninth trip of the day when suddenly a large cube of laterite breaks off from the sagging peak and cascades noiselessly down. I experience momentary darkness. I have only seconds to puzzle it out, to haul myself free and out of the way of the avalanche before its arrival. I barely manage to escape being trapped. But we are excited by it. Tons of laterite falling at our feet like manna and quail falling from heaven for the people of Israel make our work easier for the day, as we do not have to dig and only have to shovel it into the tipper truck.
On the last day, we work until the sun labours up the hill and begins to ease down west, a red ball of fire the size of a large breadfruit head. We have worked fourteen trips, and we have only a few more remaining. Eke was almost perfect in his estimation of the number of buckets the project would gulp. In all, we have done a hundred and forty-six trips in ten days. We are sitting in the pit, fatigued, smoking and waiting for the tipper truck to return. Already the evening is looking good, as beautiful as the orange wash of the sunset.
Suddenly a deep crack tears my mind away from our evening at Mama Obodo’s bar back to the quarry, a cleavage so loud and sudden the earth appears to have fractured. The ground heaves from beneath us, whirling like a massive roller coaster, the heavens engulfed in a great blanket of darkness. It’s a nightmare in which the earth disconnects from heights and a landslide plummets from the skies. Dazed, I stare at death as it fountains down on us. I have the sensation of being pulled into an abyss, of drowning in a dark sea. We are a stampeding herd of buffalo, Eke, Jerome, Nduka, and I, as we scrabble in what will soon be our graveyard. For a fleeting moment I glimpse the face of Ezenwanyi’s priest and hear his deep voice: The connection between them is very strong, stronger than you can imagine, and that is why she comes to him in the dream, as a sign of that everlasting bond, a sign that she will be there for him if called upon in times of need or distress.
“O-ki-ke,” I cry out in a voice as loud as the great deep bellow of the sky now falling on the earth. And then I make a lunge for safety, diving, balling, and rolling away like wheels as the monstrous apocalypse arrives.
Excerpted from The Liquid Eye of a Moon: A Novel by Uchenna Awoke. Published with permission of Catapult. Copyright © 2024 by Uchenna Awoke.
Author photo: Nnabest
