Billy Goat

Chuma Nwokolo, Jr.

Sometimes he wondered if he really knew Sara after all. In his little village of Sandia, Gwarimpa was getting all the wrong signals from his wife of six months. She was no longer as responsive to the playful palm he laid on her shoulder of an evening. It took that much more to say what he wanted… and even then she managed not to understand. In that young house of his matrimony, much now displeased Gwarimpa, not least of all the pungent smell of the billy goat they were fattening in the yard as a gift for his mother-in-law’s sixtieth birthday.

That day he returned a day early from his monthly field trip to the Langa Valley to find his bed better-dressed than it had ever been before. A succulent beef stew, whose aroma put all the previous meals of his marriage to shame, simmered on the stove. A heady incense also hung in the bedroom air, staying the rank smell of billy goat from the perimeters of that romantic space. Of his wife he found no trace. He enquired of her from a little neighbour; she had dashed to the chemist across the square on a little errand.

Gwarimpa sat on his bed to wait, knowing that silent dread that was the curse of spouses who returned home inconveniently. He did not wait too long before Harki rode up, approaching by the low road rather than the more public high, propping his bicycle up against the mud wall, and knocking gingerly. Getting no response, he entered confidently only to stand flummoxed at the sight of Gwarimpa in full glower.

‘You’re welcome,’ grated Gwarimpa, whose hands were sweaty and cold, whose voice was croaky and hoarse.

‘As you are, welcome,’ replied Harki, not very coherently, sporting a grey vest that showed off his magnificent biceps, biceps that seemed to wilt visibly as he took a step backwards.

‘Sit down,’ said Gwarimpa sarcastically.

‘Oh, I won’t be staying, long, at all, I was just passing by, bye…’ And he was gone. Gone so fast he forgot his bike on the wall, a bike that Sara, walking in the moment he left, could hardly have missed.

She entered singing, ‘Darl-ing, darl-ing,’ in a song that harked back to their days of courtship, a song that broke abruptly when she saw her husband.

‘You’re welcome,’ grated Gwarimpa.

‘Da- darling? You’re back? You’re back!’

‘So I am I suddenly your “darl-ing”, again? When I left yesterday, it was Gwari this, Gwari that…’

‘Don’t be silly Gwari, you are always my darling.’

‘And why is this house looking so clean? And smelling so nice? And why is the meat in the pot smelling so sweet? And what is Harki’s bicycle doing outside the house? And what was it that you went to the chemist to buy?’

At the last query, a delicate arm tensed on the purse in the armpit but Sara laughed with an irritation that came naturally to spouses in her situation. ‘You should hear how silly you sound, Gwari? Why is the house so clean! And smelling so nice! Any man would come home and buy his wife a gift for this but no, not you.’ With that she flounced out to the yard.
He sat for a moment, reflecting on the Silliness Quotient of his words. Yet, the handlebar that poked adulterously through the window into the room and the Guilt Quotient of Harki’s shifty eyes intruded on his emollient reflections and he stalked after her into the yard – which was how he saw her fling something from her purse towards the overflowing bin, a package too small for his eyes to conclusively identify at that distance, but which looked suspiciously like a packet of condoms. He sprinted wordlessly for it. She cried,

‘Gwarimpa!’ and locked him into an embrace.

‘Let me go, you harlot!’

‘Me, you call me a harlot? For what!’

‘Let me go, and I’ll show you what for!’

But the billy goat rooting in the vicinity of the bin had also been attracted by the bright colours of the thing. With the unbelievable avarice native to his kind, he ate first, leaving regrets for later, which regrets he had in plenty in the way of the thumps and kicks and curses that followed on the eating of the indifferent snack.

‘My mother’s goat! Why are you kicking my mother’s goat?’

‘He’s not yet her goat,’ he panted, returning to the kitchen. By the time he emerged with the gutting knife, between the screams of wife and the bleats of desperate goat, a brood of neighbours had been procured. They saw the knife and cluck-clucked regretfully from a safe circle of appeasement.

‘He wants to kill me!’ she screeched, casting a wider net for a more courageous circle of neighbours. ‘He’s killing me over a packet of chewing gum!

‘I’m killing my own goat,’ he told her – and potential interveners, ‘and when I find the evidence I am looking for, your mother can have you instead of a greedy goat.’

She then began to wail, and in the ensuing melee, a sufficiently bold neighbour separated Gwarimpa from his knife. Spooked by the furore, the goat tried to bolt but the frustrated husband seized his horns and didn’t let go – until the mother-in-law arrived. She was a successful trader, a short, matronly type who was partial to fiery goat-meat-stew. ‘My son,’ she remonstrated, ‘this is not like you, what seems to be the matter?’

‘Ask your daughter!’

‘He wants to kill the goat we bought for your birthday!’

‘I will buy you another,’ he said, ‘this one has eaten evidence, which I will produce from his stomach.’

‘Evidence of what, my son?’

‘Of harlotry, Mama.’

At the vile word his mother-in-law gasped and staggered into the crowd. A chair was produced in the nick of time and she fell heavily into it. When she had collected her faculties she expressed a great fascination for the prodigious height and particular colouration of the billy goat.

‘I will give you his skin, and his meat,’ promised Gwarimpa.

‘My freezer is full,’ she replied, ‘I want his kids, that’s what I want. I’ve been looking for this type to breed, this goat will father…’

‘…am I hearing the voice of a mother here, or the voice of a mother-in-law?’

She rose to her full, indignant height, raising her trading voice to make up the deficit.

‘Look into my eyes!’

Which he did, resentfully.

‘I am a woman of the world,’ she charged angrily, ‘I have bought and sold lace from Malumfashi to Biu. There is no scam that dupes and 419ners have not tried on me. None has succeeded. Do you trust me?’

‘Yes,’ he lied grudgingly.

‘I am not a child! You see this slipper on my foot? That’s the cane I used to raise my daughter – and she’s not yet too big for me – If there’s any truth in what you say. I said: do you trust me?’

‘Yes,' he grudged, less hypocritically.

‘Then leave this to me. I’ll get to the root of it,’ she paused, and continued less angrily,

‘look, Sara is not my daughter more than you are my son, you hear? Go and ask about me. If there is any truth in that ‘har-’ word, I will find it.’

‘Mama, there’s no truth in it, I swear,’

‘Shut up, Sara!’, rebuked her mother angrily, ‘this is between me and my son,’ a warmth spread in the guts of the son as she turned to him. ‘What is this evidence that is supposed to be inside my goat’s stomach?’

‘Condoms,’ said Gwarimpa poisonously.

‘Condoms?’ she marvelled, ‘inside a goat?’

‘Imagine that nonsense!’ cried Sara, ‘What am I...’

‘Shut up, Sara!’, swore her mother, and at that moment it was hard to believe that the husband was not in fact more her son than the wife is her daughter. She turned to Gwarimpa. She sighed, ‘my son, what makes you think there’re condoms inside my goat?’
He wondered whether to remind her that it was not yet, in fact, her goat; but – between mother and son – such quibbling over pronouns seemed excessively pedantic. So he tamely narrated the suspicious circumstances he encountered on his return.

‘Where is this bicycle?’ she asked severely.

He pointed a finger, a finger that faltered as it indicated, unavailingly, a largish region of wall. Someone had clearly taken advantage of the earlier confusion to remove the bicycle. ‘It has gone…’ he said, lamely.

‘God knows I didn’t see any bicycle,’ sniffed his wife.

‘Shut up, Sara,’ said her mother, less severely. They then went on a tour of the house. The heady perfume had since dissipated, the stew was burnt, and although the bed was still impeccably made, Gwarimpa sensed the ebb of legitimacy from his case. ‘You realise how silly all this is looking,’ the mother said quietly.

‘There’re condoms in that goat,’ he insisted stubbornly, ‘and I will prove it!’ and with that he drew a machete from a pail of implements and headed back to the yard.

‘I am a woman of experience,’ she reminded him, ‘bring my goat to my house, I will get to the root of this once and for all.’

They adjourned to her house, losing the disappointed neighbours in the process. Hours passed. The mother, the couple, and the billy goat reassembled at a privy in the bottom of the yard where the goat was fed choice lettuce doused in purgative. A seeming age passed before the spluttering started from the rear of the animal, producing copious dung, and a pong of such fetor that only the inhuman steel of jealousy riveted the husband to the spot. The wife fled to the comfort of a bed in her mother’s house, on which she sobbed, bemoaning the inconstancy of a husband’s trust. The mother-in-law sat on the stool of her selfless vocation, in that privy in the garden, seemingly untroubled by the stench, as she palpated pans and pans of runny dung before dumping them down the pit latrine. Over her shoulder, Gwarimpa watched beadily, until she shook her head sorrowfully and sighed. ‘Lack of trust, my son, is a terrible thing.’

He grunted stubbornly and kept up the watch.

After twenty crowded minutes in a small stall designed – and ventilated – for the brief exertions of one person, the sitting woman was drenched in sweat. She asked for a drink of water, which the man was powerfully tempted to refuse, but the conditioning of obedience was a difficult thing to override. Besides he could not deny the extreme privations she was enduring on his behalf. He hurried to the house, barely arriving there when a victorious shout issued from the garden shed. He ran back without the water, his wife at his heels.

The mother-in-law was standing at the door of the latrine, pan in hand. Her face was severe, although the target of the severity, whether unfaithful wife or untrusting husband, was unclear. ‘I have found it.’

‘Is it…?’ began Sara in a small voice, which disappeared in a sniff.

‘What is it, Mama?’ he demanded, ‘It’s condom, not so?’

She remained silent.

‘What is it?’ urged Sara, anxiously, ‘Look at it with the eyes of a mother.’
Finally, the older woman broke her crusty silence. ‘A packet of chewing gum!’ she said coldly, ‘you owe your wife an apology, Gwarimpa.’

‘Let me see!’ he demanded, incredulously.

Her jaw dropped slowly, succumbing to the gravity of a venerable Sandia taboo. She stepped up to him, malodorously magnificent in fury, pan held high with ambiguous intent. ‘You want to reduce me to your level?’ her voice dripped with a disgust more odious than the stuff all over her hands and clothes. ‘You don’t trust me? You think I will lie? For what? It is not enough for you to drag me through this… this… this… goatshit!‘

‘It’s not that.’

‘Then what is it, exactly?’

He could not say what it was, exactly.

‘I will show you the chewing gum packet,’ she said, ‘but you must never call me “Mama” again! I won’t be a “Mama-for-nothing!”’

He gripped the whorled horn of the billy goat, trying to hold on to the sight of the bike on the wall, the guilt in Harki’s eyes, the scent of the perfumed bedroom air – all those legitimate bastions of his rage, bastions which were now as slippery as eels in a greased pan. He said something in a hollow voice, but there was a hot, liquid din in his inner ears, and when he had repeated it, he was still unsure what it was he had said exactly. She paused, as though assessing the sincerity of his words; moments passed during which it was uncertain whether she would show the contents of the pan and take away her motherhood of him, then she poured the pan of shit ceremonially down the latrine.

‘I told him!’ Sara wept, twining in the agony of his public slander of her reputation, and her private vindication of it; but her mother lived in a Sandia suburb and there were no horrified neighbours to lament her abused innocence. ‘I told him!’
‘Sara.’ That single word from a tired mother, and the daughter turned and flounced for the house.

Gwarimpa let out his breath slowly. His stomach heaved, ploughed by the purgative of self-loathing. He wished he had killed the goat on his terms, even if he had found nothing; he would far rather have been smeared with that blood than this shit. He did not know what to do now, but he could not do nothing forever, so he put one foot in front of the other. The mother-in-law released her hard-won goat to graze, which goat did not need the slap on the rump to bolt from the scene of his humiliation. Gwarimpa stopped a dozen paces away and turned to the woman. Her face was drawn, perhaps from her stench, perhaps from the exertions of the tumultuous hours. ‘And if you looked at it with the eyes of a mother-in-law,’ he asked softly, ‘what would you have seen?

She issued a long-suffering sigh, and he realised that it was not so much that he did not really know his Sara, as that he had not known, at all, this loam from which she sprang; she said now, ‘How many times must I tell you? I am not your mother-in-law, I’m your mother.’