Graceland by Chris Abani

cautioned.
    “Shut up, witch. I am not afraid of you!”
    Elvis and Efua ran to hide behind Oye’s skirt and Sunday turned back to Beatrice.
    “By de time I come back, I want dis nonsense over! How will you get well when you don’t listen to de doctor, you don’t listen to me? Do you want to die?”
    “Sunday, dere are children here,” she replied.
    He looked at her and raised his hand to strike her. It hung in the air between them as if he couldn’t remember what he meant to do with it. With a sigh he wiped his face.
    “Beatrice, see de kind of man I am becoming? Shit!”
    And then he was gone, clumping loudly down the steps. The silence on the veranda followed him down the path until he disappeared from sight.
    Edith Piaf groaned from the record player, settling like deep night over the veranda. In the flicker of storm lanterns, Oye and Beatrice sat sipping hot tea. Elvis sat on the mat on the floor next to his mother, while Oye sat in the wicker chair.
    “Why is my father always so angry?” Elvis asked.
    Beatrice smiled and ruffled his hair.
    “He didn’t used to be dat way. Not when I met him. He was full of life, and we would dance all night and he made me laugh all de time.”
    “Tha’ was just in the beginning, when you were too blind to see him for what he was,” Oye said.
    “Mama! You never liked him.”
    “Uhum.”
    “It’s dis sickness. It has infected him too.”
    “Does that mean his body is angry with him too? Will it start fighting him?”
    “No, Elvis,” Beatrice said. “It’s your father’s spirit dat is fighting him.”
    “And he’s losing,” Oye said, spitting into the darkness.
    “Mama! Elvis, read your book. I have to write some things.”
    Beatrice had her journal open on her lap, pen poised to write. Elvis nodded and silently returned to the book he was reading.
    It was about nine p.m. and Efua had been sent home. From the veranda they could see a line of farmers returning from the fields, which were located on communal land several miles from town and worked from before dawn to well after dusk with hoes and other manual tools. Elvis closed his book and watched as Beatrice wrote down a recipe for an herbal treatment that Oye was dictating to her. He watched her spidery handwriting spread across the page as though laying claim to an ancient kingdom.
    “This is what the plant looks like,” Oye said, handing her a plant. “Draw it next to the recipe. So you won’t forget.”
    “What are you doing?” Elvis asked.
    “Your mother is getting ready for her next life.”
    “By writing?”
    “Yes, laddie, she is writing down tha things she wants to remember in her next life.”
    “Dead people don’t come back, except as ghosts,” he said.
    “Yes they do, laddie.”
    “But Father Patrick says—”
    “Oh, tha bloody church!” Oye exclaimed.
    “Mama!” Beatrice said. Turning to Elvis, she said: “Don’t argue with your grandmother.”
    “Yes, Ma,” he said, his face wearing a sulky expression.
    “Come closer,” Beatrice said, pulling him close and handing him a pencil. “Here, draw next to me.”
    As he bent over the page next to his mother, his crude picture emerged next to her sophisticated one.
    ACHYRANTHES ASPER L.
    (Igbo: Odudu Ngwere)
    This is a weed common to abandoned farmlands, with a varied appearance and many branches, and can be a woody shrub or a climber, morphing shape, some healers say, depending on its mood. Its leaves are thin, smooth and ovoid in shape, covered sparely with coarse hair. Small green or pink flowers are borne on common stalks that droop when full These stalks look and feel like the tails of small lizards, which is what their Igbo name means.
    The root, macerated in water, can be applied to relieve scorpion stings. It can also be used to help stunted or crippled limbs grow back straight because it contains the regenerative power of lizard tails. Some witches claim the flowers can help you forget the sting of a broken heart when