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“Nene Atang from Calabar. She is the only girl I can marry.” This was a very rash reply and Nnaemeka expected the storm to burst. But it did not. His father merely walked away into his room. This was most unexpected and perplexed Nnaemeka. His father’s silence was infinitely more menacing than a flood of threatening speech. That night the old man did not eat.
When he sent for Nnaemeka a day later he applied all possible ways of dissuasion. But the young man’s heart was hardened, and his father eventually gave him up as lost.
“I owe it to you, my son, as a duty to show you what is right and what is wrong. Whoever put this idea into your head might as well have cut your throat. It is Satan’s work.” He waved his son away.
“You will change your mind, Father, when you know Nene.”
“I shall never see her,” was the reply. From that night the father scarcely spoke to his son. He did not, however, cease hoping that he would realize how serious was the danger he was heading for. Day and night he put him in his prayers.
Nnaemeka, for his own part, was very deeply affected by his father’s grief. But he kept hoping that it would pass away. If it had occurred to him that never in the history of his people had a man married a woman who spoke a different tongue, he might have been less optimistic. “It has never been heard,” was the verdict of an old man speaking a few weeks later. In that short sentence he spoke for all of his people. This man had come with others to commiserate with Okeke when news went round about his son’s behaviour. By that time the son had gone back to Lagos.
“It has never been heard,” said the old man again with a sad shake of his head.
“What did Our Lord say?” asked another gentleman. “Sons shall rise against their Fathers; it is there in the Holy Book.”
“It is the beginning of the end,” said another.
The discussion thus tending to become theological, Madubogwu, a highly practical man, brought it down once more to the ordinary level.
“Have you thought of consulting a native doctor about your son?” he asked Nnaemeka’s father.
“He isn’t sick,” was the reply.
“What is he then? The boy’s mind is diseased and only a good herbalist can bring him back to his right senses. The medicine he requires is Amalile, the same that women apply with success to recapture their husbands’ straying affection.”
“Madubogwu is right,” said another gentleman. “This thing calls for medicine.”
“I shall not call in a native doctor.” Nnaemeka’s father was known to be obstinately ahead of his more superstitious neighbours in these matters. “I will not be another Mrs. Ochuba. If my son wants to kill himself let him do it with his own hands. It is not for me to help him.”
“But it was her fault,” said Madubogwu. “She ought to have gone to an honest herbalist. She was a clever woman, nevertheless.”
“She was a wicked murderess,” said Jonathan who rarely argued with his neighbours because, he often said, they were incapable of reasoning. “The medicine was prepared for her husband, it was his name they called in its preparation and I am sure it would have been perfectly beneficial to him. It was wicked to put it into the herbalist’s food, and say you were only trying it out.”
Six months later, Nnaemeka was showing his young wife a short letter from his father:
It amazes me that you could be so unfeeling as to send me your wedding picture. I would have sent it back. But on further thought I decided just to cut off your wife and send it back to you because I have nothing to do with her. How I wish that I had nothing to do with you either.
When Nene read through this letter and looked at the mutilated picture her eyes filled with tears, and she began to sob.
“Don’t cry, my darling,” said her husband. “He is essentially good-natured and will one day look more kindly on our marriage.” But years passed and that one day did not come.
For eight years, Okeke would have nothing to do with his son, Nnaemeka. Only three times (when Nnaemeka asked to come home and spend his leave) did he write to him.
“I can’t have you in my house,” he replied on one occasion. “It can be of no interest to me where or how you spend your leave—or your life, for that matter.”
The prejudice against Nnaemeka’s marriage was not confined to his little village. In Lagos, especially among his people who worked there, it showed itself in a different way. Their women, when they met at their village meeting were not hostile to Nene. Rather, they paid her such excessive deference as to make her feel she was not one of them. But as time went on, Nene gradually broke through some of this prejudice and even began to make friends among them. Slowly and grudgingly they began to admit that she kept her home much better than most of them.
The story eventually got to the little village in the heart of the Ibo country that Nnaemeka and his young wife were a most happy couple. But his father was one of the few people who knew nothing about this. He always displayed so much temper whenever his son’s name was mentioned that everyone avoided it in his presence. By a tremendous effort of will he had succeeded in pushing his son to the back of his mind. The strain had nearly killed him but he had persevered, and won.
Then one day he received a letter from Nene, and in spite of himself he began to glance through it perfunctorily until all of a sudden the expression on his face changed and he began to read more carefully.
… Our two sons, from the day they learnt that they have a grandfather, have insisted on being taken to him. I find it impossible to tell them that you will not see them. I implore you to allow Nnaemeka to bring them home for a short time during his leave next month. I shall remain here in Lagos …
The old man at once felt the resolution he had built up over so many years falling in. He was telling himself that he must not give in. He tried to steel his heart against all emotional appeals. It was a re-enactment of that other struggle. He leaned against a window and looked out. The sky was overcast with heavy black clouds and a high wind began to blow filling the air with dust and dry leaves. It was one of those rare occasions when even Nature takes a hand in a human fight. Very soon it began to rain, the first rain in the year. It came down in large sharp drops and was accompanied by the lightning and thunder which mark a change of season. Okeke was trying hard not to think of his two grandsons. But he knew he was now fighting a losing battle. He tried to hum a favourite hymn but the pattering of large rain drops on the roof broke up the tune. His mind immediately returned to the children. How could he shut his door against them? By a curious mental process he imagined them standing, sad and forsaken, under the harsh angry weather—shut out from his house.
That night he hardly slept, from remorse—and a vague fear that he might die without making it up to them.
Akueke
