The Burial
The burial was a production in three acts: the church service, where Father Okeke spoke about Emmanuel Okafor as though he had been a saint rather than a complicated man who drank too much palm wine and loved too conditionally; the procession to the family plot, where the women wailed with a professional intensity that made Chuck wonder if grief, like medicine, could be practiced until perfected; and the reception, where mourning gave way to celebration with the abruptness of a channel change.
Chuck found himself standing alone by the grave after the last guest had migrated toward the food. The earth was fresh and red, the colour of something vital, and he thought about how his father had always said that a man who leaves his soil will never bear fruit. It had sounded like superstition then. It sounded like prophecy now. He knelt and pressed his palm flat against the mound, feeling the warmth of the earth, the pulse of something that was not his father but was not nothing either.
Obiora found him there an hour later, his trousers stained at the knees, his surgeon's hands dirty for the first time in years. They sat together on the ground beside their father's grave, two middle-aged men in expensive clothes sitting in red dirt, and Obiora told him about the will. Their father had left the compound to Chuck — not to Obiora, who had stayed, who had managed the tenants and fixed