Homecoming of the gods Read online

  Homecoming of the gods

  Frank Achebe

  Smashwords Edition

  Homecoming of the gods

  Copyright 2015 Frank Achebe

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  Do you fear death?

  Do you fear that dark abyss?—

  All your deeds laid bare

  All your sins punished…

  —From the movie ‘Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest’

  We carry in our worlds that flourish

  Our worlds that have failed…

  —Christopher Okigbo, ‘Laments of the Silent Sisters’

  To

  Ebitimi Felix

  And the many others who have brought me their stories.

  For

  Chiamaka Ojiyi

  BOOK I

  THE FACE OF GOD

  Chapter One: Thaddy

  Once upon a time, there lived a boy who wanted to know the world. His mother had died during his childbirth. His father was a devout churchman. His name was Thaddeus. He was called Thaddy.

  Much of what is our self-identity as individuals is bequeathed to us by the society to which we belong. More or less. However, there are always those whom the societies to which they belong cannot readily define according to its norms and to serve this inability, they dismiss such people as ‘madmen’ and confine them to the fringes of the society. When a person believes that were-wolfs actually exist outside conspiracy theories and fairy tales or that there is a race of aliens that mind-control us with laser rays and radio waves from outer space, we who know ‘better’ pass the judgment on them that they are ‘idiots’, ‘assholes’, ‘crazies’, ‘madmen’, etc. I mean, on a serious note, which sane person believes that? Those things serve for the intros of science fiction movies and chick flicks.

  Anyway, this is not to say that there are no real mad people who have lost nuts upstairs. Like those who throw away the nut and eat the husks. Or those that throw away the food and eat the plates. God knows that our society is becoming more and more generous after all. So all hope is not lost for those set of people. If they fight hard, they may find a place in the society.

  Thaddy did not believe in such things. They were in no way ‘reasonable’ if you think about it. He was not even an eccentric. He could pass without attracting much attention to himself but he was exceptionally intelligent.

  Thaddy was raised by a father who had lived most of his adult life as a churchwarden in the local Methodist church. He had not known his mother.

  The picture that was in Thaddy’s mind was a father who was mad with his love for God and the small stonewall church which was his age mate. Thaddy would admit readily and with a measure of guilt that his father loved him even far more madly though he was not a very expressive man.

  They lived in a fairly large room in a basement in the church parsonage. Every morning, he saw his father wake to sweep the church, dust the pews even when they needed no dusting, pick up the scattered hymn books, prayer books, bulletins and dust the pews again. He would then watch him kneel before the altar and say a quick prayer before retiring for the day. He had few memories of his father at anything else. The man’s great diligence meant that he did all of that alone with the same severity for many years. He never called in sick. Never asked for leaves.

  His father was an intense man and very stern too. But he was in no way very intelligent as most intense and stern men were. He had the meanest of education. He could only write his name and not so well too. When Thaddy grew up, the warden would call him to read out to him things like the expiry dates and prescriptions written on the packs of drugs or circulars from the church council. Thaddy remembered that the man had a lot of big books which he dusted with the same severity that he dusted the pews and the stone altar, but he had never seen the man open them.

  The man had a big bible he carried about though Thaddy knew he could hardly read. The pages were very clean as the hardback was very worn. But then the man loved holding up the pages to the light very early in the morning as if looking for something that was hidden in the black markings. As far as he was concerned, those words were too sacred for a man like him to read, not with his lips, which he had come to judge unclean. As to why he felt himself so great a sinner and his lips unclean ones, Thaddy had to wait till his death to learn that the man had cursed God after he lost his wife during the birth of his first and only child. It was not something that he ever came to forgive himself for, not for one day till he died. In fact, it was the guilt that drove him to the service of the church. It also explained the man’s reticence. It was a religious duty of penance, not merely because he had not many words to say like the rest of us. If he kept silent even on occasions when it was normal for him to speak up, it was not because he was playing the philosopher. There were not such things as he was in no way a great thinker.

  He was a sinner.

  It was in Thaddy that he poured what was his life, all of it, in the hope that his boy would one day become a parson. He lived in the hope that one day he would be a churchwarden in his boy’s church. But then two weeks after Thaddy had told him that he did not believe in God, the man had died of the heart attack that had accompanied such a fist in the eye.

  I must say that this man’s dream was in no way selfish as that of many parents. Contrariwise, it was something that he considered a service to his God and to his boy. It was a chance no sane person would refuse. The most important thing about this man would be that he in no way tried to coerce his son into becoming a parson. In fact, the big books he brought home were for the boy as he expected he would have need of them in the ‘future’.

  Thaddy knew that he was the one who had killed his father and even his ardent cynicism never tempered that guilt, not by the slightest degree. But then I should say that unlike the man he had grown to be, he had not announced to his father of his unbelief that Wednesday afternoon just back from school from malignant cynicism, the one that we associate with the unbelievers of our own age. The tone was not even disparaging. It was as a son talking to his father. He had very few discussions with his father and he had a lot of things to tell him. But the man never discussed religious things with him. Not with anyone as he saw his religious duty was to do as the priest says and nothing more. In fact, they had very few discussions.

  He was just fifteen at the time and at his age, he was ready for college. He was a genius. He needn’t his teachers to make him one, he was a natural. By the time the events in this story had happened, Thaddy had gone to six different colleges in four different countries and three continents taking science courses that he never finished. First, he had great apt at understanding things and assimilating them, whatever they were. Second, he also had great apt at discovering flaws in things that he studied. He was richer than most of his mates though he never did take any jobs. He had dozens of scholarships and most of his time away from his books, he spent them taking fellowships or serving as research assistants. And each year, there were always many of those for him if he was willing. He certainly had no A-B-C-D plans for his life. He just rolled with them as they came.

  I should say that Thaddy’s father never forced anything on his boy. I think this was the reason the man had had heart attack the night of that tragic Wednesday which was an eternity for both of them. Before dying in the local hospital two weeks late
r.

  The fifteen year-old Thaddy had sat by his side waiting to apologise to the man if he woke. He was ready to accept to be a reverend if only the man would live—for the man to live. He was in no way arrogant in putting forward his opinion like most boys of his age. But the man did not live and Thaddy walked out of that room after the nurses had struggled to ease his hands which had clenched the dead man’s right hand broken forever.

  He had prayed to God if he ‘existed’ to heal the man and bring him back to life. This was not in the usual arrogant way of seeking proofs. No, he was sincere in his asking and desperate too. He did not think that his father was enough sacrifice for his unbelief, not when the man had given him all he had in a life.

  He really was ready to take up the service of God even against his will and even in his doubts for his father. But then, God had not ‘existed’ at the moment when he so needed Him.

  I should say that it was not this experience that ‘convinced’ Thaddy that the person to whom was given those superhuman attributes as they appeared in the bible stories was nothing more than the imaginings of a group of people who sought to use it for the conquest of others. And the conviction as we would say of those who held such convictions at his age, was not in any way the mere echoing of the views of some other people whose lives they admired and whose books they had read. It was also not in any way that he could not afford to submit certain indulgences in the name of repentance on account of which the weakest of us reject God as the insufferable killjoy.

  He also was not a ‘humanist’ or a ‘socialist’ or one of those people who contended with God because they wanted to take His throne and build man and the world according to their own lofty ideals. Such men rejected God as He was their worst enemy and their most viable opposition.

  All this were cheap. Thaddy wanted above all things to know the world.

  He had a ‘Euclidean’ mind and none of that could fit into such a mind. He could not come to terms with the existence of such a person or with the things that religious traditions had witnessed of him.

  At the same time, he could not submit himself blindly to some strange authorities and the testimony of some strange and obscure Jewish folks otherwise called apostles and the ones who claimed to derive their authorities from them. The rituals were absurd. He did not understand why anyone with good sense would practice such things. There were inhuman at the least.

  He had read the bible many times. He found it fascinating and the wits of those who wrote it, impressive. But as an object of religious faith, he could not accept it.

  He could not understand. And for his inability to understand, he did not accept.

  This is not to say that there are not very intelligent men, men of Euclidean minds, who understand, accept and submit themselves to religious authorities. That would be too narrow. Things were just different for him. Given more time, he could see something he was not seeing. But that was the reality of his own unbelief.

  At a point, he sure did try to accept such things for the sake of ‘normal’. There was not any boy of his age that had any problems with that, why did he? Why the hell was he so ‘abnormal’? Many people of his age and exposure dealt with unbelief but not for the same reason as him.

  To answer the questions as they came, he tried to be ‘normal’ but found that he could never so be. In fact, most of his life had been ‘normal’ as he attended the services and the Sunday school, read the prayer books, sung the hymns and did all of those. But then a time came as it always does when we hold up what we have come to believe on account of other people and examine them in light of our own prejudices, intelligence and inclinations and even experiences. I think mine was at about when I was just fourteen years old. Thaddy’s own was not farther than that. He brooded in the depths of his soul, quietly and silently, not asking at that time any one’s opinions. Two years later, he was sure that there were no such things as ‘god’.

  Some may say that he did not try very ‘hard’. But then he was not one of those who believed merely because they had been tortured by the gory descriptions of hell or enticed by the promise of some fair and fanciful gardens called heaven. Those anxieties did not matter for him.

  Try hard at what? At believing what was not believable? At accepting things that are in no way acceptable? What about accepting things beyond our abilities as human beings to accept, understand or even practice? What about performing duties and rituals that had no relation to life and to survival? What about—?

  They were things that he could not understand and he rejected them on account of that. If he dismissed those who accepted such things, he did so because he found it puzzling and pretentious that they had come around themselves to accept those things. He even found the preaching of all those things immoral and inhuman, all as a tool for exploitation one that he was not willing to submit himself to.

  There was nothing to mask his hatred for Christianity, not the death of his father. He couldn’t use that as an excuse for his doubt, like many do and like we accuse many of doing. For at each turn, he knew it was on his account, not any other’s, that his father had died.

  # # #

  Since this story is not about Thaddy, I shall leave him off at this point. But I shall say something about Thaddy which is of immense significance to my story in general. He saw ‘god’, wherever it was used as a symbol of survival. And for that, he is not at all useless to our story after all.

  Chapter Two: Missionary Position

  It was August ’96 as I remember it, that the fetid siren that summoned the vulture to the carcass began to ring. It was a cruel and tragic month in its own rights though not any less crueller or more tragic than any other month.

  1996 was the year that Tupac Shakur was shot in Vegas. It was the same year that O. J. Simpson was convicted. In the tail of the year, the Black peoples of the world had something to rejoice as Kofi Anan became the Secretary-general of the United Nations. ’96 was the year that Bin Laden sent his first warning to the Americans. They apparently did not take him serious until five years after when he gave them their deepest and deadliest wound. ’96 was the year of the spaceships too. Like every other year, it had its own plane crashes, celebrity divorces (Prince Charles and Princess Diana for instance), scandals, controversies, elections, assassinations, wars, discoveries, etc. The world never goes to sleep and in ’96 as always, it was very wide-awake.

  In ’96, some more bizarre things made the top of the news and some other trivial things that should never have unfortunately did because they served our filthy pride.

  Among the trivial things that made the top of the news especially among we common people in ’96 as I remember with ease was the news of a certain young man whom had been identified as a ‘missionary’ that had been expelled from a small town for haven impregnated a girl. I will insist that it was ‘trivial’ because it was of no spiritual value whatsoever—at least for the most of us who made much of it. It had first appeared in a daily tabloid in a popular gossip and sensationalist column in town under the heading ‘Missionary Position’. The story was told with its own measure of luridness which made it made it the more shocking and men loved shocking stories. And when it did, it was received with cynicism in all quarters. I don’t remember anyone who questioned whether it had actually happened or not. We were sure that it had happened. The facts were quite revealing and the young man in question was all too human.

  In ’96, such sins had not yet entered into the public’s list of forgivable sins. They made sure those who committed such things paid for it in full.

  I am not sure I know why such news made a buzz among us and why such news always made buzzes when they came. I think it was because the character gave us something to talk about. And we did talk about it. I also do think that bad news attracts our attention and appeals to our pride more than the good – so long as it is not about us. To a degree, I must admit that when I heard the news that I was ‘disappointed’ and I expressed my disappointment to some people t
hough reservedly.

  I myself am a missionary.

  My reaction, though personal was critical too and I did not feel like I had broken the Lord’s command not to judge others. I think I judged myself in light of that more than I judged the young man in question and in that, I found it reasonable to be sympathetic regardless of the fact that there was no convincing me that it was ‘normal’ to be a missionary and to impregnate young girls.

  I think this was what happened to Zach when he heard the news.

  The holier ones among us were convinced that the young man was not even ‘saved’ at all talk more of being a missionary with the mandate to preach the Gospel that saved others. But I think that was too harsh, too cruel, and far too inhuman. How many of us can deny that we have secrets, damaging ones? Those that are without sins, let them please cast their own stones. The sin that most commit is the sin of allowing themselves to be caught and once in a while, everyone gets caught. As for secrets, every man has secrets, including the ones he keeps from himself.

  When Zach Bādu read the column, he was disheartened and was considerably depressed for about a fortnight after that. Depression was not what he was used to like some other people that when it came, he could not understand what was happening to him. He skipped his meals and was always absentminded and sullen.

  Ruth was not in town and thankfully too. His father noticed but could not discern.

  It was not that he was related to the young man in question. He did not even know who the young man was. The connection between the feeling and the news was not even apparent.

  It was at the end of those two weeks, when the connection had become faintly apparent, that he decided that he was going to do something about the news though he was not sure exactly what. That evening he had put a call to Thaddy and thankfully, he was in town and available.