Saving Obadiah Enyeribe Ibegwam (bio) Obadiah Anyaso's wife of two years died from an illness that shocked him, his family and friends, neighbors and parishioners: in fact, all his townspeople. Her death was the kind in which she had been seen earlier in the day, buying smoked fish and cocoyam for her evening soup, only for wails to be heard just after evening meals that Obadiah Anyaso's wife had died. In the space of a year and six months after her death, Obadiah continued to mourn her. His beard and hair, grown as a rite for the one-year mourning period, became unkempt like old toothbrush bristles. He punched two new holes in his belt to keep up with his weight loss. In that time, he aged before everyone's eyes. But in a place like Emekuku, age is a tricky concept. Take Obadiah, for instance, he who married for the first time at fifty-eight years of age to an almost fifty-year-old woman. So, they had no child, and loneliness became the footstool upon which he laid his tired legs. He had neither opened a newspaper nor touched the television remote since his wife's passing. During the period of his prolonged mourning, the town held its Uguzor-Emeke festival: Obadiah Anyaso did not show up. When the local government finally commissioned six new boreholes—whose ground-breaking ceremony had occurred three years before—the people of Emekuku poured out in huge numbers to celebrate, but Obadiah was nowhere near the festivities. There were weddings and child-naming ceremonies: his doors were locked from the inside on such days. When news was passed to him about the then forthcoming coronation of the king of the community, he paused, cleared his throat, and told a tale that isn't new. Kingship was forced on us by the English, he said with a sullen expression. "What is your point?" his friends queried. "Igbo enwe eze," he answered, disinviting himself. It was only at funerals that Obadiah was seen, like Marcelina Ngonadi's, where he was seated silently behind Marcelina's sister-friends. [End Page 148] As part of the Eucharistic procession, his strides as he walked the aisle at the Mount Carmel Cathedral got more and more curtailed. Everyone in the know grew concerned. He had long left the choir, since his voice ceased to boom. In a voice rooted in pain, he reminded whoever enquired, that he had lost his wife. He stopped attending church warden meetings and returned the sash to make a point. The only thing that remained consistent about Obadiah was his job: as a senior clerk at the State Ministry of Justice. "You need to remarry soon," a friend said to him. Obadiah shook his head, a no, which was just disinterest. "Perhaps what you really need is a much younger woman," a second offered with a mischievous smile. Obadiah ignored them. His friends and townspeople worried about his life. He had once been filled with excitement like a playful puppy. Same Obadiah that made jokes at everyone's and anyone's expense. This Obadiah who drank with his left hand—well enough to laugh with his drinking buddies but still knowing his gauge enough to not get drunk. He who was always the referee at the intertown football games. So accessible he had been that young men visited his house to seek counsel for their own lust-governed relationships. His house, a fancy bungalow, had been the standard for bachelors; then for a married couple—when Obadiah got married—it had become a neglected building. Now, its paint was faded by continued seasons of rain and harmattan. The once dwarf flowers that bordered the wire-gauze fence had overgrown the barrier. Obadiah defected on his electricity bill; twice the electric company disconnected his power supply. Once, the water board officers almost cut off his water supply. Had not one of his kinsmen offered them a bribe, Obadiah would have queued up at the community tap to fetch water. What a shame it would have been. If he hadn't been known, it would have been said that surely Obadiah had never...