And Then He Was Gone

A harrowing picture of a family after their son goes missing for twenty years.

Today in the market, I saw someone that looked like him just beside Iya Sara that sold the bright red tomato Jos. It’s funny now how I am able imagine what he would have looked like now as an adult especially as I had never seen him past when he was a child. The stranger I saw gawked with the trader. He talked and laughed and gesticulated a lot with his hands. When I shouted, “Ife!” the stranger had turned and his eyes had met mine. It was not him, I knew but I itched closer and it was only after I had moved past processing the blandness of his face, that special uniqueness that I realized I had been holding my breath all the while.

Twenty years ago, it was that path my brother followed and to never return home. I was just the house then in the front of the road side shop getting the detergent mummy had sent me to buy. He had come out from the compound then, in joggers and a polo that seemed all too big with a jerry can in his hands.

“Where are you going?” I had asked him.

“I’m going to get fuel,” he said. Looking back now, it seems so unusual what he said, ‘I’m going to get fuel’. Normally, he would have been sarcastic after all I could clearly see the jerry can in his hands. He would have gone, ‘Can’t you the jerry can?’ but then he said, “I would soon be back.”

Years later when I would while I retold and retold story, I would wonder if he really said, “I would be back soon” or if that was instead my memory playing tricks on me, trying to make our last time so palatable, like he had known, like he had prepared me for it, that it had to be his last act of niceness to me.

When he wasn’t back by 8pm, Mummy had said, “Biko Nne, I ma ife gi your brother?”

I had shook my head, how was I supposed to know what was making him stay late. Maybe it was one of his friends. Ife had numerous, if you went out on a stroll with him, you’d have to wait while he greeted this person and that person until finally, you people found your way home.

Mummy became frantic by 9pm, he had being gone for about three hours now. She brought out the torch light from her room, then she told me to look the door before she left.

I sat alone with the hurricane lamp in the parlour waiting for them. If he had being back earlier, we would have put on the generator and mummy and I would have been enjoying a Mexican soap opera, something he bemoaned. Later when mummy would have gone to sleep by past 9, he would change it without much argument from me, to an American Action flick and then put off the generator later by 11pm.

By 10pm, mummy returned home alone. It was then it began to dawn to me that something was in fact wrong. We did not lock the door and mummy sat on the couch. She looked calm but her legs agitated as if independent from the rest of her body.

“You did not see him?” A stupid question.

“No.”

“What did the filling station people say?” I asked.

“They’ve closed but I spoke to the manager and he said he would ask the attendants whether or not they saw him yesterday.”

That night mummy called Daddy who was away on a trip. He sounded reassuring. There was nothing to worry and that we should sleep, my brother would soon be home.

But we did not sleep. I lay on my bed listening to mummy twist and turn on her bed, getting up more than occasionally to use the bathroom, to check his room, to check on me.

I lay listening, waiting the clap of his slippers outside the house, to say he was sorry for coming home late, for mummy to shout at him for making her worried but deep down she was more relieved than angry that he was back.

That night, he did not return and the next morning, my father returned.

 

After a week, it slowly dawned to me that my brother was really missing. That a day had passed and another and that it was a week and he was not home yet. We had tried everything, visited the police, filed a missing person report (Something Daddy would complain later about bribing the police before they got to work). People came to our house a lot now, mummy’s friends from church, from village, Daddy’s business partners, the men he drank beer with in the evening. Ife’s friends. My friends. They came to drop condolence, sympathy. “Ebezina, he would come home ehh!” They gave suggestion, “Call this person, he works for the police.” “You should speak to that woman. I don’t know how she does it but she has done such before.” “The woman from that ministry?” “Yes, that one. I once saw her tell a mother the exact location her son was in Spain.” “That’s true, the Holy Spirit speaks through her.”

And so we called, dropped a little something here and there. We visited prayer houses, took long litany prayers and when even that did not seem to be working, then mummy took the more discrete route of juju priests and even then nothing turned up.

We wished and spoke our hopes out loud, “What if he had only been kidnapped and so the kidnappers were only keeping so long so they demand for more ransom money?” that would have been good news. Daddy would have gathered money to salvage such situation and mummy would have sold all her wrappers. What if he had lost his memory and just wandered off? But it sounded so improbably, surely he would have turned up somewhere. What if he had gotten picked up by the police? That was not unusual but mummy and Daddy had visited all nearby stations and they had bribed and checked cells. Nothing.

Weeks turned into months, months turned into seasons and seasons into years and my brother did not turn up.

Over the course of many years I would wonder how the world moved on after Ife’s disappeared. I understood it was nobody’s concern but I would wonder how mother’s got up each morning and prepared their children for school. I would wonder how children could find time each evening to come out to play when Ife was missing. He was so promising and I regret that I have to describe like that to make him seem worth it. He was my elder brother by two years, we had walked to school and church together. We played hide and seek together, we had loved the same cartoons. We fought ourselves when he hadn’t developed enough bone mass to properly beat me. Once he had punched me in the eyes so that I could barely open them. Mummy had spanked him so much, he cried all evening. That was the last time we ever fought. He was my own person and then he was gone.

It was then I began to see him, after that fateful afternoon I refused to follow mummy to church. I was seventeen then and it had become our ritual. Every Thursday there was a special ministry set up in the church by a brother who was said to have spiritual powers. Every Thursday Mummy would write a little petition, nothing much. She didn’t ask for money, she didn’t ask for blessing, all she wanted was her child. She would put the petition in a little brown envelope and slip in a little money in it.

At church, they would dig a little hole in the ground. Then they would open the envelopes brought and remove whatever money was in them. They would then put the envelopes into the hole and burn them.

“I’m not going to going to any darned church.” I was adamant.

Mummy let out an exasperated sigh. I hated that I made her feel such way. “Nne, you cannot lose your faith.” If it had been the old mother I knew, she would have ranted, perhaps even spanked me. Not on the face but on the shoulders. She would have said, “How dare you call the church ‘darned’?” she didn’t say that, instead she said, “Nne, biko nu. Ngwanu, ka anyi ga.”

“I’m not going,” I said. She went alone and after that day I didn’t go to church for a long time anymore. You see I had done everything, I had said my prayers diligently, read the usual biblical books. My favourite was Tobit. In the book Tobias went missing where he travelled to and everyday his mother stood by the route he had taken. Tobias came back, my brother did not and every evening I stood outside waiting for him to return and he didn’t, a little part of me died.

I read about people who had disappeared for years and returned. About families coped with the lost of loved ones. I read stories about ritualist who used human parts and got scared if such fate had befallen my brother. I never told Mummy or Daddy about any of it.

Then I began to see him. First it was the jerry can. The one he had used when he left the house. It was a black can with a mismatched red cover. I saw it lying by the roadside and even today, whether or not it was ours, I don’t know. A playing child ran and picked it up, it was his. I never told mummy about it.

Then he visited me in vengeance, in my dreams. The first time was pleasant, I saw him, I walked up to him. He was laughing, joking with a friend. I told him, “Ife so you are here whilst our mother worries at home?” he greeted me well, like the good brother he had been when he was still here. He said, “Don’t worry about it. I’m so sorry, how have you guys being? I love you guys. I’m fine.” I cried when and because he told he told me he was fine, I believed. I told no one about the dreams.

The second time he was more vengeful, he accused me of forgetting and we had argued what he looked. I argued that I still remembered how he looked. It would be a recurring and then he would leave me alone.

It had been first year. He was fourteen when he left and it dawned to me if he was still alive, I would know what he looked like. I should have been taller now than the memory I had of his height. Maybe he had grown beards, maybe his voice had cracked more. One of the witch doctors Mummy had met said his spirit was bound on earth and when mummy asked him whether or not Ife was dead, he was very vague about it and further refused to reply her.

Over the years I shut him off my mind. He had become a forbidden. My mother had removed his pictures from around the house and slowly the silence he had left was filled with a little chatter from here and there. “What we would eat this night.” “Who saw this where?”

Old neighbours left, new neighbours came. Once a child wanted to follow the bush Ife had taken. Mummy who was outside then said to him, “Do not follow there. People who did, did not return.”

He stared at her like she was crazy and lingered about just out of respect. When she went in, he quickly returned to wherever he was going. That night, I saw him come back.

It when I met Bala in university that I finally had the time to mourn. Disappearance was different from death. For death, it was final, there was certainty, you got to cry your eyes out and then you got to move on with life. With disappearance it was different, it started with a little worry then more worry, finally all you had a little lingering piece of hope at the base of stomach. That was why your heart to beat frantically when you saw someone that vaguely resembled the one you love. Loved.

It was in part two and I was getting to know Bala. I can’t remember what the gist was about but it was one that talked about the numerous misadventures he had with his many sisters and one brother. He asked me then, “How many are you guys at home?”

“I’m the only child,” I said.

For the rest of the evening, I was fidgety and as soon, I could, I ran back to the little room I stayed in off campus.

When Bala came to find me later, he saw me bowling my eyes out. He said nothing and just sat beside me, his hands rubbing my back.

I told him everything then. My brother went out to buy fuel and never returned. Perhaps he was dead, I should bring myself to accept that. Had he fallen into the hands of people who sold human parts for profit? Had he died slowly and painfully or was it quick and painless? I wished it was quick, that was my only consolation.

Bala hugged me and in his embrace, for the first time, I mourned whatever had happened to my brother.

He spent the night over and as I lay in bed listening to his breathe as he slept, I knew he was someone I wouldn’t mind ending up with.

One year followed another and then it was twenty years since my brother left the house never to return. In that time, I had gotten a degree and applied for my masters, my mother had gotten older, her body beginning to retain more fat around the stomach, in her arms and Daddy had died.

After his burial when all the numerous mourners, both those who cared and those who came to eat had gone, Mama and I had stood by the graveside. It was in the compound of our village house.

Mama had said to me then, “We were going to bury him there.” She looked at me. I hadn’t realized then that she had daddy had made up their minds that he was dead. “Even if it was in body bag, anything, I would accepted to see my son just one last time.”

After that, we barely spoke of him again.

It was after Daddy’s death that I went to church after close to a decade. I went for masses in the local Catholic Church. I became a lay reader and sometimes I climbed up the pulpit and read verses. During offering, I squeezed a little change in my hand and dropped in the offering box. I won’t say my faith grew in the time that I stopped going to church but I liked the community it provided.

When I came back from the market, I lay on the bed. I won’t accomplice much today, in fact I didn’t finish buying what I needed from the market. So now the nylon on kitchen cabinet had meat and egusi in it but not leaves and spice. When I’m hungry, I would eat cereal. I could always cook another day.

Tomorrow, I would go for morning mass and before the procession, I would meet the catechist and I would give him five hundred naira to book mass for my brother. Then I would come back home and prepare for work. I don’t know why do I it, I don’t expect to see my brother again but yet again, I do.

Author's Note

I look forward to your reviews. I understand that grammatical structure is quite important but I do not necessarily need that. There are a little bits written in my native language but this should be no problem as it does not affect the general structure of the story is only used in dialogue.

Reviews

[Slaynoir]

Wow that was quite interesting. I do suggest more concise means of how things are going from one scene to another though. It was quite entertaining, sad, and anger all at once. Trying to make seem a little less hurricane like in the writing may help make more ways to read it without confusion. Thought that' just me. Nothing was confusing per say as in what was being said, more of how the words were used in some areas. But seeing as you're language is not english it's understandable. Keep up the great work!

[Ike]

Hi, Slaynoir.
Thank you for the review and sorry this reply is coming late as I have not been very active on the platform.
English is actually my first language (lol). I have taken note of your opinion (thank you so much again) and I would surely keep that in mind.