Nene decides to transplant her embryo seedlings into the cocoyam farm at the back of our house, where the fertile soil is a luxuriant black, and large grey-pink earthworms slither and burrow like limbless moles.
It is a cool, late afternoon when she brings the seedlings home in a pot of fired clay. Only three weeks old, yet they’ve already started sprouting leafy ears. Nene informs us that they are improved varieties, her face alight with joy and pride. Can we believe it? The embryos would grow and become mature in just six months!
Congratulations! Mummy says to Nene happily. She is certain that with Nene’s expertise, the seedlings would be healthy babies at harvest. Daddy is furious. His ears and nose emit vapour and his hand quivers as he points at the three sprouting embryo seeds in the pot. How on earth is my grandmother going to take care of babies at her old age? He yells. Young couples do not even apply for embryo seeds anymore. All the necessary paperwork involved is exhausting, nursing the seedlings till harvest requires per-minute attention and the foetuses do not always turn out well in the end. Many of them perish when the rains become too heavy, and the few that survive either get scorched to death by the merciless sun or become shriveled, disabled babies at harvest. Does she want them to end up like the one-and-a-half-legged child of the Onaiwu couple living in the opposite flat? Does she?
But Nene is resolute. She holds her drooping breasts with her hands and looks Daddy in the eye. What does Daddy know, ehn? What does he who was uprooted yesterday from her cassava farm back in the village know? She is still healthy enough to raise a child. Her nipples leaked a few days ago! She thought she was going crazy, but it was true. Her nipples, which seven children, including Daddy, suckled as infants and which have been dry for three decades, miraculously released milk. She knew then, after she’d absorbed the sight of the drops of creamy liquid on her blouse that she still had ‘work’ to do. And didn’t she cultivate Daddy and his siblings many years before? Does she ever complain about how hard it was to nurture them before they were harvested? And what about Daddy’s own children: me and Sam? Isn’t he enjoying the fruits of his and Mummy’s toils now? Can he remember just how tremulous those early days were? So, because climatic conditions were becoming more unfavourable by the day, people shouldn’t have babies anymore? Humankind should go extinct?
No, she declares emphatically. She is going to nurse her embryos. There is nothing Daddy or anybody for that matter can do about it.
Daddy swallows any words he might have to say after Nene speaks. His shoulders droop and he trudges to his room like a man soaked in cold water.
#
Much too early the next morning, I awaken to our dog, Checkers, howling wildly in between spurts of loud barks. I sit bolt upright and listen closely in the stark darkness of my bedroom. There are more sounds: owls hooting, leaves rustling, and feet sinking in mushy soil in the garden just behind my window.
My door bursts open and I jerk up, but I catch the faint outline of my brother, Sam standing in the doorway in his striped pyjamas.
“Jesus, you scared me!”
A bright white light beams on—Sam’s phone torch.
“Won’t you come outside? Nene wants to transplant the embryos.” He announces, and even in the darkness, I can see the excitement illuminating his features. I fumble with the thick bedding and jump out of bed, my heart beating excitedly in my chest at the same moment betrayal creeps in. I can’t believe Nene would’ve gone on to transplant them without me.
Outside, the sky is a darker sheet of blue than I thought—almost midnight black. Sam’s bright torch leads the way, casting long shadows behind us as we walk to the garden, the cool breeze seeping through our pyjamas.
Checkers’ howling switches to relieved whimpering on seeing us, and he starts turning in circles, vigorously wagging his curled tail. I pat his large head reassuringly.
Nene is crouched inside one of the ‘boxes’ demarcating one part of the garden from the other in a wrapper tied around her waist, leaving her upper-body bare, her breasts as flat as slippers dangling from her chest. It looks like she’s performing a ritual—holding the clay pot containing the seedlings with one arm and mechanically pulling out weeds from the soil, her forehead wrinkled in concentration. She doesn’t even glance at us.
“Nene, Aisan,” Sam greets.
“Oya, vhare, come and help me pull these things,” She says. Sam lowers the torch to the ground and we squat under the umbrella-like leaves of the cocoyams and uproot the leaves wet with dew. Checkers inspects the growing heap of dead, limp foliage as we work, scratching and clawing at the earthworms still clinging to them. My hands are covered in wet loam by the time we are done.
Nene carefully sets the pot of seedlings down and digs three holes in the weeded ground with her fingers. Sam takes pictures randomly with his phone camera, the shutter sounding like mini-thunder claps in the still darkness. Nene takes out two of the three seedlings one by one from the clay pot and lays them in their bed holes. Their sprouted leaves stick out of the soil even when the seeds are completely buried. Then, she hands me the last one. I cradle the embryo—bean-sized and a faded pink—with both palms and I feel something throb rhythmically against my palm like a faint heartbeat. I tune out all the sounds around me until I can hear only the seedling’s heart beating underneath its sensitive, pulsating skin, and then mine, both beating together in a harmony that spreads pleasant warmth through my body.
Sam’s shutter clicks madly, bursts of light settling on me and the little one in my hands for a second before vanishing.
When Nene takes the seedling away to be buried in the ground, my hand feels very empty, hollow even.
#
It is a full, bubbly house by the time I finish wiping dirt off my body and changing my soiled clothes. It is Sam’s tenth harvest-day anniversary. The delicious aroma of jollof rice, grilled fish, and dodo fills the house’s air. My little cousins run around the house bursting balloons and giggling in excitement, eliciting occasional cautionary shrieks of ‘Esosa!!’ and ‘Oghogho!!’ from my Aunt and Uncle Parents. Even Checkers won’t stop twirling happily around in circles.
Daddy’s guests talk and laugh loudly in the living room over the blaring music but Daddy sits with hunched, dejected shoulders and doesn’t join in whatever conversation they are having. He seems to grow smaller every hour, watching Nene cheerfully exchange pleasantries with his friends. He goes particularly small when Nene starts to talk about her seedlings in the cocoyam garden, trying to get some of the guests to examine her exposed breasts to find where milk had come out from. It is here, yes, this spot. Do you see it? Feel it, full and ripe with milk.
Daddy’s other siblings, who are present, do not seem to mind Nene cultivating children at her age. Aunty Ofure squeals in delight and inspects Nene’s nipples. I see it, Nene. May the gods let me lactate even in old age! Aunty Bridget laughs and jokes about Nene acting like an Ovbiaha about to harvest her first child, and Uncle Ehigiator stares at Nene with a slackened jaw on hearing the news but doesn’t utter a word of objection.
Mr. and Mrs. Ohaito, our next-door neighbours, congratulate Nene most enthusiastically. Mrs Ohaito weeps when Nene talks about being ‘dry’ for thirty years (she too had never lactated until recently) and Mr Ohaito says that she and her husband would harvest their baby tomorrow and that we were all invited for the ceremony.
Nene congratulates them and prays that they should harvest more children. Then, she makes use of the opportunity to narrate the story of how Daddy and his seven siblings were cultivated. They were quite a lucky set; all seven were alive and healthy at the time of transplant, and alive and healthy at harvest. Baba, my grandfather, had thrown a feast of the century to celebrate them.
“I never used a drop of inorganic fertilizers like some people did,” Nene says proudly. “How do you expect foetuses to grow well in the soil when the only thing you do is to let them chuck down chemicals?”
Towards the end of the party, after almost all of Mummy’s Jollof rice is licked off the pots, all the balloons are either removed or burst, and half of the birthday cake disappears, Sam brings out his photo album (which he allows to be in the public gaze only once a year) and the visitors ooh and ahh at his photographs. Mummy and Daddy worked very hard at documenting my brother’s early memories. There are photos of him at his transplanting; Daddy holding a black cellophane filled with sand and Sam’s ready-to-be-relocated seedling and grinning lavishly at the camera, Mummy in rubber gloves dirty with grime, all stages of Sam’s growth in the soil, photos from his bud-nipping ceremony…
My mind wanders again for the one-thousandth time since the party started to the feel of the embryo in my palm, and the heartbeat—the little hint that it was real, that life, whole and powerful was within that thin strip of fragile skin.
#
The next day, my family goes to see the Ohaitos. Mrs. Ohaito welcomes us gleefully at the door, smelling pleasantly of flour and sugar. We are ushered into the living room where a handful of other guests are milling around. Daddy snorts disapprovingly at the crowd and mutters something like a child harvest day/bud-nipping was usually a private family affair so there weren’t supposed to be so many people present. Mummy coolly chides him by saying that it is only natural for the Ohaitos, who weren’t granted the right to cultivate their own babies for a very long time to want to celebrate their success in a grand style. Besides, richer couples throw more extravagant parties nowadays, or doesn’t he know?
“It’s just God that said I should start lactating, and then be granted rights around the same time.” Mrs Ohaito says to the women over and over again, after she changes from her kitchen work clothes into a pretty, flowery dress.
“It’s really the work of God,” Mummy says.
“You deserve it, my sister.” One woman says, noisily munching some chin-chin.
“Yes o!” Says another. “You think nine years is a joke?”
“We all know that getting those idiots at the ministry to accept your application and grant you rights on the first try is almost as impossible as trying to get a return ticket to the afterlife.” Says a woman, the female version of Mr Ohiato. “But for a woman’s breasts to respond to her pleas as well is even tougher.”
The women murmur their agreement. Aunty Omogui, a talkative woman with messy brown hair who lives in the apartment directly opposite the Ohaitos says after downing a glass of wine: “It is like the day someone would die. Does anyone know when their time would come? Look at Edede. How old is she? I’ve known her since I walked with my knees on the ground. She was around Mama Samuel’s age then.” She glances at Mummy. “Over forty years have passed now. And to my knowledge, not a single drop of milk…”
And so, the discussion drags on until the late afternoon, when we all troop outside for the main event—the harvest. Luckily, the weather is as cool as evening time. No one will complain about staying out in the sun for too long.
The full-grown baby plant is as tall as me, with a heavily muscled trunk, luscious green leaves and red and pink flowers that remind me of the hibiscus. There is a sweet smell wafting off the flowers. The crowd inhales, sighing collectively in appreciation.
The harvesters, two burly men stripped to the waist, take their positions on both sides of the plant while the expectant couple stands nearby, beads of sweat clinging to their foreheads in trepidation. The men pull hard, and the crowd comes alive, chanting words and singing songs of encouragement. Sweat flows down the harvesters’ tense backs and the ground below the plant tremors. Mrs. Ohaito grips her husband’s hands so tightly that his veins pop out. Even when babies were healthy from their early days, many things could go wrong during harvest.
“Isn’t it taking too long?” Sam asks me. I shrug. How should I know? I haven’t witnessed a harvest before.
The crowd’s singing intensifies as the plant slowly begins to move, its tangle of roots rupturing the earth. Slowly, slowly, slowly, it comes up until with one final yank by a harvester; the plant is off the ground and a small, dirt-brown baby is wailing open-mouthed underneath.
“It’s a boy!” One of the harvesters screams. The happy cheering of the crowd is deafening. Aunty Omogui and a few other women begin to sing and dance. Mrs. Ohaito half-slumps on her husband in relief before recovering herself and taking her baby from a harvester. Sam takes a series of photographs in rapid succession.
I stare at the new-born, being jostled around happily by the guests even with mud caking his skin and his plant bud still clinging to his navel, and with a surge of warmth, I think of how someday, Nene’s seedlings—now as small as peas—would grow and become like this.
Mrs Ohaito hands her baby over to Nene, the oldest person around to nip the bud with a broad smile. Nene rubs her hands with red oil and salt and deftly yanks the bud off the un-cleaned baby’s navel. The baby’s cries increase in pitch. Nene hands him over to his mother who immediately thrusts her nipple into his open mouth.
#
Three mornings after the Ohaitos harvest their baby, our family awakens to Nene’s loud, strangulated screaming. We all rush to the backyard to find Nene sitting on the bare earth, legs astride, still wailing. The sun is high up in the sky, casting everywhere in a golden light too bright for so early in the morning. Some yards away, under the newspaper-wide cocoyam leaves, Checkers is still digging up the holes where Nene’s embryos were buried. Everything that happens next happens in a blur. Mummy joins Nene in the wailing. Sam dashes forward, dog chain in hand and a vicious look on his face. I search the black soil for the seedlings, heart racing. The chain in Sam’s hands locks around the dog’s neck. The first seedling suddenly pops out of the dug-up soil like an orange seed spat out of a child’s mouth. Sam smacks Checkers so hard that he lets out a yelp. I find the second seedling. Checkers continues to whimper as Sam drags him to the porch. Nene’s voice echoes off the porch. Her cries are mixed with choking sounds. I can hear Daddy telling her sternly to keep quiet. I find the third one.
I kneel in the dirt, turning the seedlings over in my palm, their newly sprouted leaves already wilting and sprinkled with soil. I wonder which embryo I held that day Nene planted them. My hands shake. Was it this one? Or this one? I pause to feel their heartbeats, to grasp faint evidences of life within their now shrivelled skin. There is none.
Michelle Enehiwealu Iruobe is a writer and storyteller from Nigeria. She was shortlisted for the 2023 Isele Short Story Prize. Her stories appear in Lolwe, Isele Magazine, Kalahari Review, and elsewhere. She is mercifully in the final lap of pursuing a law degree.