First I saw the white angel. He was resplendent, with expansive silver wings. He descended amid thunder, wings flapping loudly, whoop-whoop-whoop, smacking air and slicing rain. I’d been drifting to sleep, and when I startled awake, there he was on the football field, fanning the grasses with his descending wind. I was stunned, seeing this from an upside-down perspective—I liked to sleep on my back—but what I saw next forced me onto my stomach, ushering in my days of sleeping that way: the devil itself sliding down our corridor. It could only be the devil, this coal-black thing with mighty curved horns gleaming in the thundering night.
They were both mighty creatures—movies did not scrape the surface of their monstrosity. When, trembling less but weeping in my soul, I peeked at them, they were tussling in our corridor, bodies gleaming wet, stooping like two bulls as they charged, protecting their heads from the high ceiling. I watched as the devil shoved the angel away from the door of our house, slicing and digging with its horns, its fangs, its long, long fingernails, leaving bloody gashes that closed back up, but slowly. The angel shot orbs of light from his golden spear, the devil faltering in its relentless charge, bleeding smoke. It made a frightening sound, like a stream in a forest full of birds and darkening trees. I blinked hard, again and again, pinching myself.
All around me, boys snored and muttered in their sleep, hearing nothing, seeing nothing. I needed desperately to wake up from this nightmare. It had been raining since night prep; Aunty Music had to cancel choir practice, allowing Ifeanyi to complete his story with us in the chapel before we all dispersed to our dorms (maybe Ifeanyi had put ideas in my head with his ghost stories). I recalled falling asleep, recalled waking up and walking to the corridor to pee, standing beside one of the cement beams and pissing into the hedges below. I recalled returning to my top bunk, located a few tight bunk beds away from Soludo’s, and I certainly recalled closing my eyes for a second as lightning flashed across the sky—as it did now—thunder cracking the pouring blackness with its guttural blast, like a bomb going off in the sky, shaking the world and blessing our hostel with a soft, fierce breeze.
This was not a dream.
Back outside, the devil grabbed and flung the angel’s spear across the football field, ripping through his skimpy white robe, digging its fangs into his neck and chest, the angel unable to defend himself without his spear, his wings billowing wildly. Suddenly they froze, and the angel’s fading eyes glanced at me, quizzical, cold with a bone-freezing hunger, and the devil whirled round, looking pissed, tossing him onto the hedges and rushing at my window. The angel grabbed his spear, limping, scurrying across the field into Classroom Block. Again, my trembling, soundless scream, only now I wanted to weep as well, wishing I could run. A stupid fear flipped me over face up, paralyzing me there. This was real, this was happening for real—why me! Satan was at my window, poking in its horned head like a giant spider cow. I wished to faint. Its face was immeasurably gigantic up close: endless, yet it fit into the window. As it hovered over my face, I took in this strange human face, bulbous triangular eyes, fangs, and mighty curved horns. I knew immediately that this was a deity. I quaked with dread. Deities could be hostile or friendly, my mother had told me, depending on their nature and mission. A different force from fear was keeping my eyes open, saying Don’t blink, making me feel deep in my bones that this was a game of wink. We stared eyeball to eyeball. It was like looking into the eyes of the world. Shimmering there were the lives of everyone I’d known, somehow, in this and previous lifetimes, plus the lusts and terrors of a million strangers, their days and presences darting behind its fiery irises. Now, it was like a curious insect, smelling of wood, smoke, and earth, and of the forest in the morning.
It began to hum, light, like a big bird whistling out of a wooden mouth; like a strange man humming in the forest. I-yulu-yulu-o, i-yulu-yulu-o, it sang in my face, in my ears, smoke breath all over me. Petrifaction gripped me from head to toe, keeping me still, expanding, expanding, until I was awash in a cool, satisfying wonder.
It retreated gingerly, strutting down the corridor, its back rippling with the motions of its unruffled walk.
I felt a coldness between my legs and knew that I had peed myself.
The morning Soludo ran away, the ghost in the toilets of Awka House sang a long, eerie song. It was strange, how too few people in Block B heard the song, even though it came from the walls of their toilets, whereas Samson and I heard it all the way in Waddington House, wide awake in our beds, its tremulous frequencies across the school compound like tattered lamentations. I did not really hear the words, it was maybe the wind or my deficient Igbo, which the other boys teased me often about, saying Igbo gị eyerọ eye, but I understood that she was full of questions for the cosmos, the ghost, and that I was this singer’s least concern.
One minute Soludo was holding me, the next he was gone, and it was raining beads, all thunder. How did I hear the song through that racket? I did not sleep, I prayed in my mind, thinking at some point Protect me within the hedges of your consuming fire/And preserve me in the cloudburst/of your gentle morning. When they struck the rising bell, I woke to the sweetest breeze and refused to leave my bed, could not, I had slept for what felt like five minutes but was probably an hour, and I would be tired and sleepy all day, and we had math first period, and Collins had died, and Soludo had run away. I wanted so much to cry, missing my mummy and thinking of home, where no one had died, where Grandma or Daddy or Mummy were ready to hold me if a strange bird wailed too loudly at night, Grandma saying Don’t fear those powerless witches, he that is in you is greater than he that is in the world, Daddy saying Don’t be afraid, it’s just a bird.
Around me, boys were shuffling out of bed, conformists heading to chapel where we ought to be after waking for Morning Prayer, the more daring ones retrieving their pails and gallons, creeping toward the water tanks and the showers before the after-prayers rush.
Samson appeared at the head of my bed. My corner was dim, seeing as it was in the middle row and was surrounded by a barracks of bunk beds. He tapped my shoulder, thinking I was asleep. “Wake up. Eche is going to ring the warning bell.”
My heart swelled inside my chest and I began to sniffle.
“Ifyy,” Samson called, leaning over me. “What’s the problem?”
“Nothing,” I said. “I just thought how Collins used to ring the bell every morning.”
Samson looked at me strangely. “So? Someone has to ring the bell no matter what, do you expect them to let us sleep forever?”
My heart squeezed itself. “You’re wicked,” I said.
“No, I’m not.”
“Yes, you are. You’re a very wicked boy.” I was crying fully now, quietly.
“You’re the wicked person.” His voice faltered as he began rocking my shoulder. “Sorry. Sorry nah, o zugo. It’s going to be okay. Let’s go fetch water before they ring the warning bell.”
I sat up groggily, rubbing my eyes with my arm. Samson sat beside me, lifted his shirt, and, his arm around my shoulders, wiped my face with the hem. I leaned down to meet him halfway, feeling better.
“I don’t want to,” I said into his shirt. “I want to go back to sleep.”
He looked at me like I was silly. “What if Eche—God forbid, Chaplain himself—inspects around and sees you sleeping? They will use a cane to wake you up.”
“I didn’t sleep last night. There was this strange sound.”
Samson’s face erupted in fright, like he had seen a ghost, something frantic in his voice as he said: “What sound? What did you hear?”
“You heard it too? It was raining.”
“Yes? It rained this morning. Was that your strange sound?”
“No. It was raining when I heard the sound.”
A sheet of fear fell over his frozen face. It made me nervous, remembering that bloodcurdling sound. My eyes darted around the emptying hall. I wondered what evil lurked in the darkness between bunks, my mind creating images of the most fearsome-looking demons I’d seen on TV: ugly and messy haired, always in black or white wrappers, their faces painted with nzu or charcoal, lips unbelievably red.
“Let’s just go to chapel,” I said. “But first I must tell you something, but promise not to tell anybody else, you hear? Promise?”
“Promise.”
“Soludo ran away.”
In chapel, when the keyboard comes on, all woofing and shuffling stops. Everybody stands at once, red hymnbooks open, at the ready.
Mine still smelled of the printer’s that Sunday morning of Freedom Week, our first week here, when we’d been new. I’d flipped pages hither-thither, searching for the song, and finding it, stared blankly at the words, listening to everyone else sing the first verse. “Aren’t you Anglican?” Samson asked. He spoke English with the same Igbo flavor as Soludo, but his had the sharpened edge of someone whose parents had money. We were Anglicans, of course, but I wondered if Samson was the sort of boy to tell the truth if I weren’t. It was a school for Anglican boys, but my mummy had said as she signed my forms months ago, “I hear many non-Anglicans forge baptismal certificates to get in.”
“I used to attend the children’s church back home,” I told him. “And even our main parish did more praise-and-worship songs than hymns.”
“And they’re—Anglicans?” A sneer on his face, like, Imagine that. I shrugged.
The hymn was slow. My uncle used to play songs like that all the time, going la-lu-lu on Grandma’s radio all afternoon whenever he returned home from university, filling the house with such boredom, I sometimes imagined hiding all his CDs away. In Bishop’s Memorial Chapel—the official name, though we all simply called it “chapel”—my body reacted differently, with wonder and love: the keyboard sounded like the organ in our cathedral back home, filling the chapel with its mighty sound, like a majestic beast climbing the walls. When the choir emerged from the vestry, I was ready to die—I had never heard voices so beautifully blended, like one person singing various complementing notes at once. First, the cross-bearer, in his white and red robes, and then the choir in their red robes, moving like saints, singing like angels, “Spirit of Truth and Love”; walking to their pews, turning, not quite like orderly soldiers (they moved too calmly) away from us to face the altar. The second procession: two acolytes. Soludo? I mouthed, surprised. They flanked the cross-bearer at the entrance of the chancel, their red robes having little sacks behind like hoods, the acolytes’ girdles giving theirs a shapeliness. Reverend floated to the front of the altar and everyone bowed together: priest, acolytes, choirboys, and 240-something boys moving their heads at once. What a fantastic choreography!
In the chancel, Soludo sat still, hands on his thighs. There was no restlessness in him, Soludo who so far that week had shown me that he was a rule-breaker, making us skip chapel once to go fetch water. He stood, he sat, he bowed (stand-sit-bow was all he did in that altar). He was focused, Soludo who spent prep time, when we were supposed to be reading, gisting in the corridor with his friends. Boredom entered his face when Reverend began to give the sermon, saying, “The devil will tempt you with pleasurable things.” Soludo looking up at the ceiling, head thrown back, pure concentration on his face, as though counting the squares. He did not seem to care that, seated up there, he was a center of attention, that all eyes were on him. I, too, looked up to see what he was seeing, but it was the same flat white squares that began to expand and meld, like a snowy kaleidoscope.
I thought of Freedom Week whenever things got too hard. It had been, so far, my best week at our school, with no house duties and no punishments. Now I had to sweep outside with my friends and observe hours without failing, or else risk getting in trouble.
The opening hymn this morning is “New Every Morning Is Thine Love.” Kosi plays the first line on the keyboard, the tune “Melcombe” clacking round the chapel, an unsure intro.When we open our mouths, our voices are as unsure; sleep is in our mouths and our throats, and fear is in my heart, and we drag the song the way we drag and shuffle our feet in the morning, much to Chaplain’s chagrin—lazily. Could I call it the voice of an angel that had serenaded me the night before? Or was it the beguiling lure of an evil spirit? I shuddered to think. It had been a beautiful song, a strange and ethereal tune, sad and funereal. I’d learned that word the very week before while flipping through my English dictionary. Forgotten was my delight at discovering such a beautiful word, funereal, how I diddled in my little book of new words and sentences: dark and funereal was the gravesite; sad and funereal was the procession . . . the song. Was it a coincidence that I had happened upon that word in a dark corner of the library? I’d been in search of the dictionary and, finding it there, where the naughty boys liked to sit, settled in to stare at the words they’d left behind—Jude loves Eze; Aunty English pa Manchester; stupendous Aunty Music; Ebuka was here, Set ’094 for life—names, and all sorts of funny and rude remarks scrawled into the history of our library walls, our library desks, and all over school in the toilets and dormitories. Proof we were here, with each other in this time.
Collins hangs like a sob in my throat. Thankfully, they have spared us chanting the Psalm. I love chanting but not today. I move my lips as Chapel (we call him Chapel the same way we call the labor and dining prefects “Labor” and “Dining”) drawls each alternate verse while we respond in kind. Samson is right behind me, now he leans his head and arms on my back, resting on me. His weight on me is light. We must chant the Gloria so Kosi plays a tune. We bow at “Holy Spirit,” facing the altar with the plain brown cross; I bow low and in the brief darkness of my closed eyes I swear I hear her clear as day, the girl, singing, ụwa na-eme ntụgharị-ntụgharị.
Samson was humming our morning hymn while he swept his portion beside our hostel block. There was a canopy of trees there, mango tree touching orange tree, branches outstretched. The grounds were puddled from last night’s rain, and instead of proper sweeping we poked out refuse with sticks and threw them into old Bagco bags. “Melcombe” was somber, which made it perfect for morning prayer, but it was never this dreary, the way Samson sang it like a prisoner doing hard labor, reminding me of my recurring dream in which a group of slaves gather cotton under scorching heat while singing, all the time, of the river Beulah.
A quiet breeze blew, rustling the leaves, which shook their wetness all over us, for a second it felt as though I could hear the trees sigh, saying, “Ahh, yes.” But I’d not gotten a good night’s sleep and was certainly hearing things. I looked up at the moon retreating slowly in the distance, like it was waiting for the sun to arrive for its shift before making its final descent, and imagined that they liked to say good day to each other, the sun and the moon, and then I thought of stories of witches holding covens in the night sky. I tried to remember if it had been a full, crescent, or halfmoon last night, tried to remember what meaning each was supposed to carry.
“Lee! Lee!”
Boys clustered around Marcus, making wondering noises. Soon, the circle grew, hands reaching, saying, Ka m kirie, ka m kirie.
“What is it?”
“It looks like a shrapnel!”
“What’s a shrapnel?”
“It’s a type of bullet. They used it during the Biafran war.”
“How come it is still here? War that they finished fighting more than thirty years ago.”
I joined the group of scrambling boys and, after some struggle held the shrapnel in my hand. It was like a rusty periwinkle shell, but metal, with lovely spikes. I rolled it between my fingers, feeling its delicate coarseness. I wanted to keep it for myself, a toy, not to play with, but to look at and to feel between my fingers.
“Sir Obinweke used to talk about it last term, before your set came in,” Marcus said. He was repeating JSS 1, and sometime last week an argument had broken out during morning duty, JSS 2 boys insisting that his status as a repeater ended in the classroom, that he was supposed to join them in the sweeping of the hostels, which was the more arduous task (the wet floors, the obstructing bunks, and all those stubborn feet coming and going with their dirty slippers while you mopped the floor), after all he sat with them at meal times, not us. “He said they discovered some years after building the school that Biafran soldiers had laid mines and built a bunker on this very land. He even brought people from the Ministry of Memories to collect the things they found in the bunker. Luckily, none of the mines were active, if not—poof!”
“Woah.” We shivered, fascinated by the thought of things blowing up. Samson took the shrapnel from me while someone else reached impatiently for it. And so it went, from hand to hand.
“We should submit it,” Samson said.
Marcus snorted. “Nah, it doesn’t matter anymore. This is not the first time, neither is it the last.”
He took the shrapnel from Samson and, walking past the mango tree to the fence, flung it into the compound with the lonely white duplex, the rest of us watching in disbelief before erupting in protest.
