Excerpt
I: The end, almost.
Seated on the balcony of the house across the street is a man. He is slumped in his chair and has remained unmoving for several hours. The tattered frays of his agbada spreads about his person like an old sailcloth, snapping in the wind. His equally tattered hat is positioned on his head such that you cannot see his face. He has maintained this position for nigh on a day (which is much, much longer than you think).
If you think him dead, then you'll be wrong; if you think him alive, well...
Look closely.
You may find that the skin of his hand is the texture of old wood, the shrivelled grains of a tree long exposed to the elements. You may find that the wrinkles on his face are unmoving, the tight curls of his beard a little too solid, the globes of his eyes a little too elliptical.
Don't be alarmed, it is exactly as you think: he is made of wood.
After some five hundred-odd years of roaming the treacherous terrain of the Midworld, his journey has led him here. Now. Sprawled on that balcony as unmoving as a tree.
Waiting.
II: The years before, before.
Jaja's first memory is of a weeping, wizened face.
"Papa?" He stretches to touch his Papa, and a thin wooden hand appears in his line of vision.
"Oh," Papa gasps, tears streaming down his cheeks even as he smiles. "Oh, bless the stars!" As Papa sweeps him off the table into a hug, Jaja sees the hem of a dress vanish as the shop door clatters shut. He glimpses the impression of a woman through the dusty shop windows.
This is the first he sees of the woman who gave him life. His mother.
The act of procreation was a deceptively simple thing: Papa carved him from the finest wood, and the woman he calls mother filled him with life.
"Who is she?" Jaja asks Papa several times in the intervening years. It is from Papa he learns her first name: Moremi.
"Moremi?"
"Yes, my boy," says Papa, filing the wood that will become the hand of a new toy. Jaja wonders vaguely if that is how he was assembled. He knows that that is how he was assembled.
"I met her at the edge of town, on my way to the forest to..." He gazes shiftily at Jaja. "Life had not been very good to me, you see. Once, I had been wealthy, the most renowned toymaker in all the land, but soon people forgot about me, and the shop became as silent as a tomb, quieter still when my wife died. So, I decided to walk into the forest, walk until I could walk no more.
"It was hard to notice her at first, yes, because her skin was the dark of midnight, but her hair, oh...it was like light trapped in locks!" His eyes glaze with the sheen of reminiscence. "There was something about her that made me forget my troubles. She said, 'That is a fine boy you have there, sir.' And that is when I realized I had been cradling you in the pit of my arm. My wife and I, we never could have children, see. So, I made you for her, the child she could never have. When she died, you were the only thing to remind me of her.
"This woman, she knew why I was going into the forest. She knew what I intended to do. So, she took my hand, and led me back here to the shop where she commanded me to fix you up. I gave you new hinges and oiled the rot of your hand. And she watched me night and day as I worked. And when I screwed on your last finger she wept."
"She wept?"
"Yes."
"Why?"
"She must have seen what a beautiful boy you are," says Papa, "Weeping, she took you and cradled you to her breast like a newborn babe, singing a song as old as time. When she placed you on the table, you were...you." Papa wipes his eyes. "Moremi, she gave me purpose. She made me want to live again. She gave me you. And she did not even wait for me to thank her."
The years pass and Jaja doesn't age. But he doesn't worry much about it; he knows he's not an ordinary boy.
Still, boys will be boys and in his free time he makes mischief. With friends from down the street he terrorizes the neighbourhood with the sweet abandon of childhood.
And he watches his friends go gangly, sprouting like beanstalks from childhood and into youth. And they in turn look at him with fresh eyes, the scales of innocence lifted, as they realize that he is different.
They turn on him. With sticks and stones and hurtful words, he is reminded that he is other.
He weeps.
The shop is his refuge: his endless youth is given to toil; to filing wood and oiling hinges, to air-drying wood just right, to wiping it down with vinegar and scrubbing the uneven surfaces with glasspaper, to oiling with beeswax and lacquering for durability.
Papa does not have much, but he cares for him. Jaja knows what it is to love and be loved. And he loves that old man right until the very end.
Jaja stands long at the fresh mound of Papa's grave, wondering who will love him now that Papa is gone.
That is the moment he decides to find his mother.
That is also the moment he starts to age.
