Winston told her he would be delighted to attend, when she called to invite him. He teased her about the accomplishment, saying she’d better make sure she was joining an honor society and not a secret society because sometimes they looked the same, and she teased him back, saying the only secret society she would ever consider joining was the one he’d joined, which had taken him from Chicago grocery store cashier to Wall Street lawyer. Winston laughed, told her how proud he was of her, and on the day of the induction ceremony, he left work early to join her and Fatou and the kids in front of the auditorium. While Fatou stayed with Timba in the hallway, Winston and Liomi clapped and cheered as Neni, alongside twenty-eight other students, was formally inducted as a member of Phi Theta Kappa. After the ceremony, Winston took everyone to a sushi restaurant where he ordered a platter of eel and avocado rolls, California rolls, and shrimp and cucumber rolls. He encouraged Fatou to have as much sake as she wanted, laughing with her as she downed it and slammed the cup on the table every time.
“We enjoy lika this when she join société,” Fatou said, giggling at her silly self for acting like the girls she’d seen on MTV, “what you gonno do when she become pharmacist?”
“He will take us to a restaurant in the Trump Hotel,” Neni said, laughing, a spoonful of miso soup in one hand. “He will hire Donald Trump himself to cook steak for us.”
Winston shook his head. “No,” he said, smiling at the fun the women were having at his expense. “The day this our special girl becomes a pharmacist, I will take everyone to a place called the Four Seasons.”
Forty-eight
THE RAINY SEASON IN LIMBE BEGINS IN APRIL. THE RAIN COMES EVERY few days for an hour or two, not too heavy to stop the townsfolk from going outside but heavy enough to force them to put on their chang shoes before braving the muddy streets. By May, the rains are heavier and times between downpours are cooler, though not so cool that the townsfolk have to put on sweaters just yet. The May rains tend to come at night, drumming so loudly on zinc roofs that some folks fear they will awaken to find their roofs lying on top of them.
The night Pa Jonga died was one such rainy May night.
His wife and children had spent all evening and the early part of the night rushing out in the unabating rain to the backyard kitchen, to boil masepo and fever grass for him. They made him drink it, along with the paracetamol and nivaquine the pharmacist at Half Mile had prescribed. The pharmacist had diagnosed Pa Jonga with either malaria or typhoid fever, and had asked that Pa Jonga be given the meds on a full stomach three times a day. Ma Jonga and her sons did everything the pharmacist said, but neither the white man’s medicine nor the native medicine worked: Pa Ikola Jonga died at four in the morning, around the time of the neighborhood mosque’s first call to prayers.
Jende had two hours left before the end of his shift at the Hell’s Kitchen restaurant when his middle brother, Moto, called him on his cell phone within an hour of the death. The old man’s body was still lying warm on his bed. “Papa, don die, oh,” Moto cried. “Papa don die.”
The chef excused Jende for the rest of the night. “I am so sorry for your loss,” he said. “Please extend my condolences to the rest of your family in Africa.”
Jende sat with his head down for the entire subway ride home, too stunned to cry. He found Neni wailing on her cell phone when he entered the apartment. Upon seeing him, she dropped the phone and ran into his arms to hold him. It was then the dam behind his eyelids broke.
Papa, oh, Papa, he cried, how could you not give me one last chance to see you again? Eh, Papa, how could you do this to me? His nose, eyes, and mouth were spewing out liquid in all directions. Why did you not wait for me, Papa? Eh? Why you do me so?
Winston and his girlfriend, Maami, came over just after midnight. Winston took off the day from work, and Maami—who had recently moved to New York from Houston after Winston had successfully wooed her back and immediately impregnated her—brought her laptop to do her accounting job in the bedroom. Many friends came over in the evening, the same friends who had come to dance when Timba was born. None of them asked if Jende would be going back home. They figured he would tell them if he was going, and if he wasn’t going, well, no grown man should be made to tell anyone that he couldn’t go home to bury his father.
Pa Jonga was placed in the Limbe Provincial Mortuary and buried two weeks later. Jende sent the money for the funeral, a two-day extravaganza of food and drinks, speeches and libations, dancing and singing and crying. It was an event that cost more money than Pa Jonga had made in the last ten years of his life. His body, adorned in a white suit, was placed on a bed of bricks covered with a brand-new white bedspread. All night, Ma Jonga sat on the floor beside the bed, dressed in a black kaba, nodding as sympathizers filed through the room to view the remains and encourage her to be strong.
Ashia, mama, they said. Tie heart, na so life dey, oh. How man go do?
The next day the remains were blessed by the pastor of Mizpah Baptist Church, even though Pa Jonga had not been to church in decades. Ma Jonga had always wanted him to be baptized just like Jende and her other sons had been; she had envisioned the pastor dipping him into the little stream that flowed through the Botanic Garden and then raising him out of the water as the congregation sang, Ring the bells of heaven! There is joy today, for a soul returning from the wild! But Pa Jonga wanted none of that church palaver. When I die, he told his wife, I go follow Jesus if I see ei with my own two eyes.
“Which church is going to agree to bless him now?” Jende had asked Moto as they talked about how they could give Pa Jonga one of the best funerals New Town had ever seen (no one with a grown child in America should have an ordinary funeral, the belief in Limbe went).
“Any church that likes money will bless him,” Moto had replied. “I know you’ve already sent all the money you can, but if you could send a little more so we can give a nice envelope to a church, they’ll be glad to send their pastor to bless him and send him straight to heaven.”
For the first time in many days, Jende had laughed.
He sent the money and learned the next day that Mizpah Baptist Church had agreed to bless his father. Ma Jonga was still a staunch card-carrying parishioner of the church as well as a member of its Kakane women’s group. It was for her sake that the pastor agreed to come to the house and bless Pa Jonga on his journey to Paradise. The money Jende had sent was not to pay the church, after all, but as a thanksgiving offering for his father’s long happy life.
After the funeral service, the Kakane women’s group, dressed in their social wrappers, led the mourners in a march from the house to the graveyard. A hired marching band followed the women, and then came the rented Land Rover bearing Pa Jonga’s brass-handled casket. Behind the Land Rover, a two-mile-long cluster of family and friends marched, some with framed portraits of Pa Jonga lifted high above their heads. They marched and they danced and they wailed all through New Town and through the market, crying and singing, Yondo, yondo, yondo, yondo suelele.
Jende watched it all on the video he had asked Moto to have made.
He watched the six-hour DVD collection in one sitting. He saw his mother collapse in grief when the casket opened to reveal his father’s body after it had been brought home for the wake. He listened to the speeches about what a good man Pa Jonga was, and what a fine farmer and draughts player, too. He watched the dances that went on from late Friday night to early Saturday morning. He listened to the pastor’s sermon in the house, a sermon about how neither death nor life, neither angels nor demons, neither the present nor the future, nor any powers, neither height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, can separate God’s children from His love. Jende watched the moment when his father was lowered into the ground and the pastor bellowed, Ikola Jonga, from dust you came, to dust you will return.