Mike was a know-it-all, yes in the annoying way and not just from reading. He was a know-it-all because it was a gift from a spiritual being, one we did not know. He used this analogy to explain it to me;

“Let’s say I have a laptop and I send it to the shop every day. Whenever I go get it back, I see something new on it, like a movie, a game or whatever, there is always something new on my laptop. Now, my brain is the laptop, the shop is the royal looking dude and the new thing I find is the new thing I just happen to know”.

It was a confusing analogy, that gave me more questions than it answered the ones I already had. I asked him what gift I had and he didn’t know. I asked him again who the boy with obsidian eyes was and once again he didn’t know. He didn’t know why mum was being weird, he didn’t know why my mum refused to send me to church again.

He just happened to know everything except the things that mattered

“I had a dream yesterday though” Mike said suddenly “My gift and your attack has something to do with our history.”

Which history?

“Our parents’ history”

My parents avoided their history and their family like a plague. There were no photo albums or Christmas visits to grandma or grandpa. We didn’t even know their hometowns or where they grew up, much more how they even met. My mum told us that all we needed to know was that the church was our family and our father stayed silent on the matter. Knowing this, I knew that this was definitely going to be a problem. How will we figure out our history when the only people around us who knew our history didn’t want to even talk about it?

“Ask the god guy”

“You think I didn’t try? He’s a steel trap. He almost let you die, that one. He wants us to figure shit out on our own.”

How?

Mike shrugged.

“We have to get them to spill” Mike moaned frustrated “But how? Bloody how?”

I knew how and because I knew how, Mike knew how.

During dinner that day, I asked dad how work was. He choked on his rice in shock as we had strategically not told him that the mutism demon had finally taken its leave. I apologized which caused him to choke on the water this time.

“Maybe you stop with the talking thing” Mike said, looking with concern at my dad who was still coughing.

“How are you…?” my dad managed to say when the coughing died down.

“Today at the tree house” Mike answered for me beaming with pride.

“I knew that tree house was a great idea” my father was equally beaming. I had never seen him this happy before, looking at the smiles of the two most important men in my life was like the sun rising after a storm. It filled me with warmth, light and so much hope. Mum wasn’t at dinner today; she went for evening service at church.

Good, she should stay there.

“Why does mum hate me?” I asked abruptly. My father’s face went from joy to sadness. He let out a sigh and said that we would discuss this later.

“Dad, please” I pleaded with him, tears threatening to fall “I… well I almost died. Mrs. Appiah saw me get hurt and she didn’t help. You always say the church is my family, how many of them came to visit?” My voice was breaking “She reads the bible against me! There is…”

“After dinner…” the look on his face was of great pain, his frown met his eyes, nose and mouth. My father looked like he had aged many years “… but Nikita eat. You used to like food so much, just eat.” Unwilling to back down from the plan, I kept my hands dutifully at my sides and stared at my father, hoping he saw it as defiance and not as disrespect. Finally defeated, he sighed “Eat, okay? We’ll talk about it in the tree house”.

In the tree house, Mike brought snacks that amused my father; Mike and I had coke and cookies, while dad had beer. Mike told him not to ask us where he got the beer from. We made ourselves comfortable on the bean bags our father bought for us.

Dad started by asking us about the books we read and how far we had reached in our education. When he found out about the plot of Harry Potter, he laughed hard and asked us to give him the books when we were done. He was stalling, more like making a futile attempt to.

I almost hated to do this, but I had to.

“Daddy” I said with questions in my voice. He looked at me for a while and then took a sip of beer.

“We’re Èʋegbe” he mentioned the word weirder than I know it to be pronounced. He mentioned ‘Egbe’ instead of ‘Ewoe’ how everyone pronounced it. “Your mum and I lived in the same village in Kpando. Now your mother had a big family.” My father chuckled, lost in the memory. I looked at Mike, wondering how he knew my dad liked beer on account of our strict religious upbringing “Her father had 5 wives, he was an old man too o. 5 wives and 27 children” Mike and I exclaimed in surprise. I thought that was the sort of thing that happened in the olden days. I suppose that when my mum was young, it was the olden days. I wondered if my grandfather knew the names of all his 27 children.

Stolen from its rightful author, this tale is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

“Yeah, a big family. But he was a very… strange man” my father seemed to go into himself, a part he had not visited in a while, digging up his memories and smiling when he recovered one, like meeting an old friend and then telling us what they told him “He was a very staunch traditionalist but he went to church for, you know, social status.” I tried to imagine the man, old and wrinkly with a bit of a belly, bowing down to wooden figures along with his entire family while he clutched a bible in his hand to go to church later.

“He convinced a lot of people to worship his gods, because among all the farmers, he was the most successful. His harvest alone could feed the entire village. My father worked for him. He even had the chief about his finger like this” he held out his index finger on his left hand, to show us exactly what he meant. “We all thought it was due to the human sacrifices though”. Mike and I’s eyes grew wide. Dad noticed this “Oh yes, his gods liked human blood and in return, everything he did prospered.” I was enjoying this bit of my history, despite the gory parts, but what has it got to do with what we needed to know?

Patience, Mike’s voice in my head says.

“He had a daughter, Dzidzor. She was ugly” he laughed guilty. I noticed that when he got deep into the story, he drank more. He took a swing and the bottle was empty. Mike handed him another. “Every day, I worry about you children” but he said this with a smile on his face and he took another swing.

“She was his first born. Very tall, skinny but Efo maltreated her. No one knows why, he heavily pampered your mother and his other children, all except Dzidzor. Everyone stayed away from her, people even said that she wasn’t Efo’s child and that they adopted her, but why would they adopt her, only to treat her badly?”

Although she went through a lot more than me, I couldn’t help but relate to her. I began to feel like an impetulant spoiled child. Could I even call myself abused? I had all the food I could eat, a brother who supported me and a dad who loved me. Who even knew, maybe my mum loved me, but she was just worried about my future and what kind of woman I would be. Every girl my age I knew were meek and mild did all the house chores and were probably assured of important and rich men to marry, but all I cared about was climbing trees and reading books. It is obviously a cause for alarm.

Or was it?

“She would farm, do dirty menial jobs, she even slept with the animals. When asked, Efo would say his gods had cursed her and we all kept quiet, after all he knew more about the gods more than we all did. But it was a lie. Beatrice, your mother, her name was Ewoenam at the time, she told me that Dzidzor wasn’t cursed, no she was blessed. His gods had especially chosen Dzidzor for great things. She would be even greater than he.” it began to dawn on me and Mike nodded in agreement

“Efo wanted everything to go to a son and the gods choosing a her made him so furious. He tried to placate the gods with sacrifices. A lot of people died that year, including the chief’s son. The chief’s hands were tied, he himself was a servant to Efo and his gods. He hated her, his own daughter. And the way he would beat her…” he paused, sipping beer again “But she was strong. She survived. He found out that she was good with farming, and anything she put into the ground would grow. At 8 years old, she had her own small garden at the back of the house that grew so many crops and flowers. Even a rose began to grow in that garden” at the mention of rose I flinched. “But obviously all the children, all of them destroyed that garden, his wives threw dirty water over her and Efo beat her. They tried their best to destroy her. They almost did” Goosebumps rose over my skin. I imagined an 8-year-old, wet with water, being beaten and hooted at. The tears standing in my eyes made the world blurry. My chest was so heavy, how could they look at a child and do this? What kind of legacy is this?

“But they couldn’t. A man came to marry Dzidzor, she was 14 years old, and your mother was 12. We were all surprised as she was so ugly and skinny, her hair didn’t grow and her stomach was big, filled with worms. They say that this man was one of Efo’s gods. He took her away and she was never to be heard from again” At least there was a good ending for her. I wondered where she was and what she was doing now “but at home, oh there was wahala at home!” my dad’s accent began to slip from his normally poised and clipped English “2 weeks after she left, Efo’s main farm caught fire. It was the biggest fire Kpando had ever seen. No matter what Efo tried to do, it never worked. He used to win all the lotto; he has kept losing to this day."

"With no source of income, the once great lion was completely finished and to make everything worse, he fell sick! Boils all over his body, oozing pus. When I saw him, I vomited. The way my father beat me” my dad laughed again, reminiscing. “The people he used to command over came to offer themselves as sacrifices but the gods were all silent. They had left him” I was smiling so much my dad ruffled my hair and called me a bad girl, but he winked at me and Mike “In anger, he cursed every woman in the family with his blood and with his spit. And from that time on, almost 30 years ago, despite that fact that everyone is a Christian, no woman has been able to do anything except be under a man. 5 years after this curse, when they were worshiping his gods, the house caught fire, everyone in the house died that day. Miraculously, apart from the children''

We were quiet for a while. There was a curse on all the women in the family? Is that why mother was so adamant on keeping me at home to learn chores and cook because she knew my life won’t amount to much anyway? How could the same gods that asked for the blood of humans look after an abused person? And I thought being a Christian was enough to break all curses on ones’ person, or were there exceptions? Was one of these gods the one that communicated with Mike? Or the boy with obsidian eyes…

There were too many questions, with little to no answers

“Dad,” Mike said, taking dad’s empty beer bottle and putting it carefully on the floor “What was your Èʋegbe name?” I admired how Mike mentioned ‘Èʋegbe’.

“Semanu”. Mike and I gushed on his name. We loved how it sounded and how it rolled off our tongues. My father beamed.

“Why did you change your names, dad?” Mike asked again.

“Asante is actually my name; my mother was Èʋegbe but my father was Fante. He migrated from the Asante Region because he wasn’t doing so well there. We changed our names to English names because of your mother. She left the village when she was 20, so we could settle elsewhere after the marriage. By that time, your mother was indoctrinated into the Christian religion. She still admired her father, but she didn’t want anyone to know about her past and Dzidzor, so she made us leave, and we made life for ourselves, away from the gods and the conspiracies.” Mum and dad were already married by then. What took them so long to have us? My question would not be answered today, because mum was back from church and she was hysterically screaming for my father.