A Short Story - "Bones Not Mine"

'BONES NOT MINE'

By

Kenneth N. Okafor

I was a word collector all right, but I learned a tongue twister on a sad day.  Let me write it out in full: Discombobulating. It did not turn out easy on my tongue.  Dis-kom-bo-bu….  You see what I mean?

            Imagine the consternation then when Father Milo uttered this regular tongue twister two times in as many days.  The remarkable thing was that the heavenly worthy was not referring to any wife of his.  Roman Catholics and celibacy remember?  In Ntole, it was on top of the head of a recalcitrant housewife that one was forced to use a strange word two times in as many
days.

Yesterday was the first occasion.  It had been with reference to the antics of the man whose name in common English meant ‘Who-are-you?’  In the throes of pious indignation, Father Milo forgot he was addressing himself to a bunch of swamp dwellers, a backwater tribe with little appreciation for an unfamiliar tongue much less an obscure word. The otherwise unflappable eminent had lost his almost somnolent air of righteous calm over the insistence of ‘Who-are-you?’ to libate mid-stream Imia’s burial.

"This matter ought to be wholly a church affair.  Imia had been a daughter of the church.  This insistence at pagan worship I find most discombobulating."

There it was.

Colonialism had arrived the shores of Ntole on the belated tide of time.  Therefore, it was only natural that neocolonialism, the offspring should find its last bastion in our rustic backwater. Father Milo was neocolonialism to his critics.  He showed neither appreciation for our culture nor sensitivity toward its symbolisms.  The vehemence of ‘Who-are-you?’ who was the "Chief Priest" of the traditionalists to observe the practice of the forefathers baffled his Roman Catholic mentality to no end. In the ensuing test of wills, the priest decided to back down in order not to alienate the larger portion of his fickle parishioners who were yet struggling with tenuous faith. But he refused to watch the ritual as the blindfolded bereaved stood by the graveside, with shoulders hanging with forlorn sag like the rest of Ntole and a hand raised feelingly to pour libation.

Nobody voiced the contradiction. ‘Who-are-you?’ was, in fact, defying tradition.  Because our forefathers also opined that the elderly ought not to look upon the corpse of the youth.  Ntole was however united in grief tradition notwithstanding; Ntole had indeed lost one of her princesses. Thus, this indiscretion was thoroughly ignored.

Would ‘Who-are-you?’ have broken taboo on account of me…?

"Sixtus, can I have a word with you? " Father Milo’s voice cut short my wandering thoughts. He preferred Sixtus to Amusuowelukoko, my native name.  For the heavenly worthy not to trip up on his tongue I let him call me Sixtus.

Ntole witnessed the priest confer with me, and it turned a plain puzzle.  These conferences had occurred frequently in the past few days.  Silently, tribesmen wondered if death had brought religion to me. 

No, I was not about to become a good son of the church.  Father Milo with his devilishly keen mind had merely fathomed my predilection for foreign language and had offered to help me with Latin, dying language or not.  But I knew indeed that it was his cue to preach to me at a later date. The priest, I knew, considered me less a heathen than the geriatric ‘Who-are-you?’ my estranged father, therefore, somewhat redeemable.

The priest remembered mother again.  "What can be done for your mother?" 

The embers of suffocating anger kindled in my heart.  Was Father Milo mocking me?  I did not have answers for him or for my mother.  Imia seemed to have had answers, and now the light of day had quenched her aspirations and hopes, shrouding them in unfathomable mystery.

"Father, explain why Imia?  She was the right angel wasn’t she? "  Mother had asked that while she wept her eyes sore.

I had interpreted the question to the priest.

Father Milo made appropriate mutterings to encourage mother’s failing heart.  "It is for best perhaps.  We are unable to question these things.  Nor completely understand the mystery
thereof.  Take heart, child."

Child?  A full-grown woman feeling some very adult feelings, child?  That was another Father Milo’s quirks.  In his ecclesiastical sight, every parishioner was ‘child’.

"What can be done for your mother?" he asked gently for the second time.
Father Milo was patient with me.  And with my frigid tongue.  I tried to answer the question as truthfully as I could.

"Tomorrow, Father.  Perhaps, I would know then."

All these had been yesterday.

Today was the second time Father Milo used the word when we jointly discovered death was not the worst fate to befall the dead.

I glared at the fresh grave aghast.  Just that same yesterday the priest had stood alongside and intoned the final words, "Tu es pulvis et ad pulvis redebis "  (You are dust and unto dust you will return). 

And Imia was supposed to have had her last rites.  Imia, vivacious Imia who had run off to escape the bucolic clutch of Ntole by sailing the high seas of adventure to Limelight.  For ten years she journeyed…  Well, wherever she was now she could never run another step. The long arms of Ntole had finally embraced her remains.  Or so we thought. 

When the huge mechanical bird in which she was flying could no longer obey the law of lift, with gravity grasping the contraption and plunging it into the hungry Atlantic, what had been her thoughts?  Certainly her perfect mind must have been thinking perfect thoughts of a perfect place like Paradise where imperfect heathens from Ntole could not be.  I could have sworn by the gods of Ntole that those would have been the heretic seeds in the mind of the religious bigot.

That was part of the greater irony.  For someone who all her life had pretended to be a perfect, to be perfectionist nothing about her burial was perfect.  The wrong bones had even been buried in her grave!

"Unfortunate mistake, Sixtus.  Most discombobulating."

The impending scandal set my teeth on edge.  Surely the whole of Ntole would forget its grief this instance and mock!

Most dis-kom-bo-bu…oh, I should stop trying!