Glory be Mercy (3)

Between the end of the rainy season and the beginning of harmattan in 2009, when snails came out in droves and crawled against every surface, the small ones so tiny they blended into the mossy green of tiled compounds, and the sky was no more a stormy grey but a light film of dust particles, fog-like but not precisely, for dust never drops into moisture; when the seasons married each other before separating again, Glory and Mercy met. The soft collision between life and death happened as Glory walked toward Junction, that luminous intersection between the main road leading away from Malali and its smaller offshoots, one toward Ghana Road and the other, deeper into the enclave. It was the end of a school day wrapped in a haze of tiredness. Glory walked hunched, looking down, unaware of the cars passing. Tall desert palm trees flagging the road promised her nothing but their eventual disappearance. Since the morning she had been told of Mercy’s death, an announcement that coincided with the riotous laugh of Bomboy, who lived one floor down and was intermittently struck with a case of the giggles, Glory felt immovable, unable to place herself in the grand history of all living things. She could not explain to classmates and friends, teachers and strangers, relatives and visitors to their home, the string of known and unknown mourners who lamented the loss of the promising young girl, a medical student, that there was no direction to her feelings about her sister’s departure from the realm of God’s children.

Trying to place herself on a path in which she would accept events as they happened was like trying to find an assured road to heaven. No one who had arrived at the pearly gates had returned to give excellent directions. No one who was not Glory could tell Glory how to feel about living in a world with no Mercy. The mourners’ condolences were approximations. Sometimes funny in their declarative intent, such as the man who said she should not leave her parents’ side lest they feel they have lost not one but two children, and sometimes crude in their desire to cease the pain, like the woman who said that everything happens for a reason and Mercy must belong to the angelic to die in her sleep. The closest to how she was feeling, the best map of her grief, was of madness. Stupefied undulations between moments of acute clarity that, indeed, Mercy was dead—and she was in pain for the halting of her sister’s life—and absolute disbelief that Mercy was dead because they had unfinished business, their relationship an open and incomplete book of sisterhood. The door had been shut mid-conversation, and no matter how Glory shoved, probed around for lingering assurances of a sister that once existed, a person she once knew, there was no definite proof, not in Mercy’s mattress that lay propped against the wall in their shared room, nor in the few boxes that were returned from the hostel and held her ascetic collection of clothes, books, and shoes a few sizes smaller than Glory’s. Mercy had transitioned from matter to memory, from a vacuous and puzzling presence to a harrowing and abiding absence.

Her parents had surprised her with their willingness to jump and protect the memory of Mercy. She watched them become zealous practitioners of religions she had otherwise barely known. Her mother began attending the ECWA branch that congregated at the Government Primary School behind their building. Sometimes, when ardent praying woke Glory up at dawn, and she intuited that her mother was not at home, and she heard someone shout, Pastor! Pastor! I have a testimony; she imagined her mother’s body responding to the convulsions of belief coursing through the community. What conversations was she having with God about Mercy? Her mother did not entreat Glory to join her, and Glory suspected it was because hers was a private battle. Over the weeks after they had laid Mercy to rest in a quick Muslim ritual, she heard her parents mumbling at night from across the hallway. The event had bound them in a novel understanding of the world’s underbelly. They did not believe Mercy’s disappearance from their lives had occurred naturally. Vigilant to the way hope can be snatched, the apple of an eye eaten by worms of evil, they had become warriors. Where her mother found God in a church, her father began extended consultations with a series of bearded Mallams whose heavy perfumes left a trail of scents long after their departure. They would come in the early evenings, just before Maghrib but right after Asr, and he would lead them into Junior and Charles’ small room, where she suspected a prayer mat was laid and potential enemies identified. She witnessed her father begin drinking from a bottle filled with a dark, inky fluid, a ritual she was also not invited to partake in. If Glory was doubtful about the usefulness of her parents’ response to losing Mercy, how she wished they had assembled to cry rather than diverged to pray, she did not say anything. She could not say anything. She thought it tender to maintain her role in their blooming desire to protect themselves and what was left of their family. Glory felt merciful in keeping her quiet and playing the part of the child who was still here.

She thought it was an uncomplicated role. A matter of remaking dreams, where she would decide to be as much of Mercy as she could while bringing joy to her parents through the simple virtue of being alive. It conjured a previously lacking energy towards her schooling, where she spent the last few weeks before the end of the second term and the beginning of the third and final term before the WAEC exams, trying to hold on to what her teachers had shared. In the past, she had been averse to listening in classes because she thought the teachers not only drab in their droning on about things she would never need beyond the walls of their classrooms but also cruel in their criteria of what it means to be a good student. The teachers were sweet on those who nodded to them like dogs and held the words from their mouths like drops of gold. Glory, who could barely please her parents at home, certainly would not please strangers at school. Except for one rare moment in her academic life, when a youth corps English teacher took an active interest in her thoughts on the passages they read, Glory held no hopes of liking school. Mercy’s death willed her to try again. She sat in the front of the classroom and tried to listen, to acquire what she lacked by summoning the persevering legacy of Mercy.

To believe, to choose to believe in a story, in an idea, the shape of anything, is to descend into doubt. The time of Glory’s dedication, as a potential extension of Mercy, of her role as the child who was alive and will therefore seek to be as good as the child who died, was filled with uncertainty like she had never known. She had isolated herself from herself. Taking in unspoken expectations left her looking at a stranger in the mirror. The stranger who hunched and waded toward home, feeling both trepidation about what she would find and relief that school was moving farther away. The stranger upon whom Mercy’s ghost will visit and join to walk in step.

Mercy looked at Glory with the eyes of a mother hungry for information. Her sister was the same size in flesh, soft as always around the waist, but shrunken in spirit. The maneuver of a ghost conversing with a living being was only as complicated as minds made it to be. Mercy’s spirit was open, for death leaves little room for lies, but Glory’s was wound as tightly as a honey badger caught just before it burrowed into its hole. Mercy had to find a way to get her sister to release, to let go of her worries long enough to overwhelm her, to flood her consciousness with provocations that would reveal a shared reality.

Mercy searched the stretch of road as they approached Junction. She needed an oddity, a strangeness to unmask the stranger, to prevail over the moment and break Glory out of her self-involved ruminations. A security man sat outside an open gate, eating a plate of rice and stew. Cars parked haphazardly on the road indicated an ongoing event at the house, possibly a naming ceremony or the first greeting between the families of a future bride and groom. The man, tasked with ensuring the security of the occasion, seemed unbothered by the budding chaos at his front step. Instead, the plate of food drew his attention to such great heights. Mercy found the movements of his mouth hilarious, an exaggerated chewing motion where his jaw rotated in large circular motions, each spoonful larger than the last. Glory should have noticed. Instead, she wound through the cars blocking the pedestrian path and continued. Mercy needed something that would take Glory out of herself long enough for a door to open in her spirit through which Mercy would enter, an encounter.

Her lucky break came with a man and his cow. The herder, dressed in a matching blue Kaftan and cap, stood by the side of the road while the rest of his herd, beasts in colors from brown to pure white, grazed behind him on a plot of land where a building once stood but had now become mere foundation. All except one of his herd attended to their evening meal. The exception was a young calf that stood next to the herder, at almost a foot taller, as he washed his mouth with a chewing stick, making attentive motions of up and down, in and out. The man and his cow did not touch. Nor did it seem like they cared for the presence of one another. But there was something within the image of a man and a cow upright next to each other, as one would imagine an animal so wanting for a parent would stand next to another of a different species. There was something in it, a framing of companionship, that would beleaguer even the most distracted of minds. Glory stared, puzzled at what she was seeing. She looked at something stranger than her thoughts and feelings. She looked long enough for Mercy to brandish her ghostliness, merging with the air around them, and to send one message to her sister divided by the thin veil that is between all that is living and all that dies, between seasons of rain and their cousins of drought, between those we know and never understand, and those we do not know but seem to completely understand.

Glory was overwhelmed. She burst into tears just as she passed the man and his cows. Mercy’s ghost had done what it needed to do, entrapping her sister’s malaise long enough to greet her through memory, to peruse the entirety of her being with a newfound curiosity. They both remembered who they were and why it mattered, no matter how brief, that they had been related as sisters. Even if they were born into a world that spun faster than they could make sense of it, with a mother who scares and a father who pressures, all in the name of love, even if they eventually could not ignore how different they were, Mercy more willing to concede to the brutishness of survival and Glory only able to say yes to her immediate pleasures, even if theirs had been a relationship marked by the tragedy of wanting but not having, of desperately seeking life beyond the circumstances they had been born into, beyond the days in that house in Malali, they had found delight, perhaps surprise, living with each other.